Hi everyone,

It's been a while since we've had one of these devblogs, so I figured it was about time to inform the community of the current status of things we're working on.

First of all, we finally got around to giving Thoby the necessary tools to create his own in-game 2D interfaces. These are needed for the upcoming slayer expansion update. Looking at the amount of code changes he's done in the past months, it looks like that update is going to be a pretty huge one. Lots of smaller issues will be addressed in that update as well. I'll be sure to assist him in the process and lend a helping hand in finishing that update where needed.

In the meantime, I'm focusing my energy on the Chambers of Xeric, the next major piece of content I'd like to bring to PkHonor.

It's no simple feat and certainly much harder to work out than the Theatre of Blood. Each chamber separately will not take nearly as much time to implement than those in the Theatre of Blood (thankfully so, because there's a lot of more of them), but getting the details right will be very hard. Mostly because the rooms can occur in any random order and I'm not entirely sure about the precise mechanics of how the entire raid is built up.
I am aware of the following:

• There are two possible "rotations" of boss rooms
• A rotation can be either clockwise or counterclockwise (so there are four different possibilities of boss room combinations)
• A raid starts at a random point on one of the boss room rotations
• There can be anywhere from three to five boss rooms in a raid in total (I think)
• There can be any random number of skilling rooms in between the boss rooms (not even sure about this one)
• A raid always ends with the Great Olm as final boss

However, there are literally three different versions of each room to pick from (a few rooms are not shown here are as they are at a different height level):


It's going to be quite the challenge to puzzle them together in a way to make everything fit properly. Our raid layouts will certainly differ from OSRS simply because I lack the knowledge of how everything is supposed to work, but I'll do my best. I'll also have to utilize some code from our construction skill (which I wrote over six years ago) to pick specific parts of the map and put them together to dynamically build the layout of each raid.

Please do let me know if you think I got any of the information wrong. Also, if anyone has specific insights in the raids (that are not otherwise listed on the OSRS wiki), feel free to let me know here, so I can make our raids as close a match to OSRS as possible.

The layout is going to be the first and at the same time biggest challenge for the entire minigame. Once I've figured out what all the possible room combinations are and how I can fit all the map pieces together, I can get started on working out the rest of the mechanics along with each room itself.

I'll be sure to keep you guys know once I've managed to get past this major hurdle.

Once again an update that's taken us far longer to develop than we had expected, but then it also contains a lot more content than we had initially anticipated. Check the bottom-right corner of the first screenshot for an overview of all the new items introduced in PkHonor's last (but far from the smallest) update of this decade!

Warning: you need to bring Boots of stone or Boots of brimstone to the dungeon, otherwise you will rapidly take damage from the hot floor! Donators and premium members do not need to bring any boots. Boots of stone can be purchased for 1,000 coins from any slayer master.

First off, the Alchemical Hydra!




It has exactly the same mechanics as the Alchemical Hydra in OSRS. It requires a slayer level of 95 to kill and you can only kill it while on a Hydra slayer task, which is currently assigned as both a hard and elite task. You need to have a slayer streak of at least 3 to be assigned Hydras to prevent simple task skipping.
It has four phases: green, blue, red and black. In the first three phases, you need to lure it over the correct chemical vent to reduce its defences. Luring it over the wrong vent will increase its max hit instead. Each phase also uses a special attack: poison, lightning and fire. It will continually switch between ranged and magic attacks in the same manner as on OSRS. However, unlike OSRS, there is only a single roll on its droptable. The rates have been increased to compensate for this.
The drops are as follows:

• Hydra bones, granting 4,000 prayer XP when buried.
• Hydra leather, which can be crafted into Ferocious gloves at the machinery inside the Lithkren vault. These gloves provide the best in slot melee bonuses and can be traded.
• Hydra's claw, which can be combined with a Zamorakian hasta to create the Dragon hunter lance. This lance has +20% accuracy and damage against dragonkin monsters (see this article).
• Alchemical Hydra heads, which can be stuffed and then mounted in a player-owned house or used to recolour a slayer helmet.
• Hydra's eye, fang and heart, which can be combined into a brimstone ring. The brimstone ring grants the combined bonuses of the archer, berserker, seers and warrior ring but cannot be imbued. It also gives you a 25% chance to ignore 10% of the target's total magic defence, this also applies to powered staffs such as the trident or Sanguinesti staff. The ring is tradeable, its components are not. Similar to the Abyssal bludgeon and Dark totem, you will always receive the component you have the least of.
• Dragon thrownaxes, these have a special attack that offers 25% bonus accuracy and guarantees an attack on the next game tick.
• Dragon knives, these have a special attack that will make you throw two knives at once. The knives can be poisoned.
• Ikkle Hydra, the Hydra pet, which can be changed into four different colours. Like all other boss pets, it can be fed an ex-ex-parrot to be turned into a lucky pet.

Hydras


Similar to the Alchemical Hydra, Hydras require a slayer level of 95 to kill. However, they can be killed without slayer task. They drop the same items but they do not drop the Hydra leather, claw, heads or pet. After every 9 attacks, they will spit three blobs of poison which you need to dodge.

Drakes


Drakes attack with melee and ranged and will launch a dragon breath attack after every 7 attacks. This dragon breath attack can be dodged by walking away or can be partially blocked through an anti-dragon shield. It drops the following items:

• Drake bones, granting 3,000 prayer XP when buried
• Drake's claw, which can be combined with Boots of stone to create Boots of brimstone. These boots provide decent defensive bonuses along with small ranged and magic bonuses, unlike most melee boots which grant negative ranged and magic bonuses.
• Drake's tooth, which can be combined with Holy sandals to create Devout boots. These boots provide the highest prayer bonus for any pair of boots. As part of this update, the Holy sandals have been added as a possible reward from medium clues caskets.
• Dragon thrownaxes
• Dragon knives

Wyrms


The weakest of the new dragonkin monsters introduced in this update, Wyrms use melee and magic attacks and drop the following items:

• Wyrm bones, granting 600 prayer XP when buried.
• Dragon sword, its special attack grants 25% bonus accuracy and damage to your next attack.
• Dragon harpoon, which is similar to the barb-tailed harpoon so it can be used to fish sharks without losing an inventory slot. It can be combined with the smoudering stone to give a 1/3 chance to instantly cook your catch. After 5,000 uses, you will need to recharge it with another smouldering stone. It has a special attack that boosts your fishing skill with 3 levels.
• Dragon thrownaxes
• Dragon knives

You will also find Sulphur lizards in the dungeon, which mostly drop mining resources, along with fire giants, greater demons and hellhounds.

Lastly, we have also decided to lower the price of the wooden shield in the donator store to 50,000 coins instead of 75,000.

That's all for now! Next year we'll first be wrapping up the slayer expansion that Thoby has already done a lot of work for and then focus our attention on the Chambers of Xeric.

Happy new year everyone!

Although the development of the Alchemical Hydra itself is done and the boss has been properly tested by the community (or so I hope), there's still some work to do in order to add the rest of the Karuulm slayer dungeon, along with a proper way to craft the Ferocious gloves from Hydra leather.
This is further offset by the numerous mandatory family gatherings this time of year from which there is no escaping. I was initially hoping to release the dungeon this week, but I'm afraid the release will have to be postponed to next week.

In the meantime, we are organizing a rare item Christmas sale. Three ultra rare items are put up for sale in our donator store. There is no time limit on the sale, but we are only selling a limited amount, similar to our white apron sale several months ago. There's a good chance that we will sell these items again in the future, but we guarantee that we won't be selling any of them for six months after the last item in the store has been sold.

The items are as follows:
10x Wooden shield for 75,000 donator credits each.
5x Bag of grain for 100,000 donator credits each.
10x Cape of legends for 150,000 donator credits each.

This update also includes two fixes for bugs that were reportedly being abused by players. I included them with this update because they were rather urgent, other bugfixes will follow soon with the Alchemical Hydra release. Several more bugfixes will be included with the slayer expansion update which is planned shortly after the Alchemical Hydra.

The bugfixes are as follows:

• Dying will now properly reset all antifire, antipoison and antivenom potion effects
• You can no longer set up a dwarf multicannon at Zulrah

There's still some work to do before we can release this new piece of content on our live server (check out my developer blog for the current work in progress), but at least I've already managed to finish all the mechanics of the Alchemical Hydra so far. Hop on to our test server to have a go at it!

I've enabled an Alchemical Hydra event on the test server so that anyone can enter and fight the new boss without requiring a slayer task. Please report any bugs on this thread, so that I can fix them ahead of the release on our live server.

Keep in mind it doesn't have any drops yet, the dungeon does not have a boots of stone requirement so far and we still need to add all the other Karuulm Slayer dungeon NPCs.

I've managed to make quite some progress on the Alchemical Hydra already. Thoby had started with a bit of the groundwork for this new boss earlier on, now I'm working to finish it up. All in all, I'm hoping this whole process will not take much longer than a week, after which we can focus our attention to the slayer expansion (which Thoby has been doing a lot of work on lately) along with the next piece of highly anticipated content: the Chambers of Xeric.

A small sneak preview of the current work in progress:


The addition of the Alchemical Hydra also means we'll be adding the entire Karuulm slayer dungeon as well, with the appropriate amount of Hydras, Drakes, Wyrms, Sulphur Lizards and other monsters.

Here's the current to-do list, I'll do my best to keep it as much up-to-date as possible:

• Instanced rooms & respawning
• Transitions between forms
• Wakening when it is sprayed with the right chemical
• Empowerment when it is sprayed with a wrong chemical
• All animations
• Regular attacks for each form
• Special attacks for each form
• Regular hydras
• Drakes
• Wyms
• Sulphur lizards
• Other Karuulm dungeon spawns (hellhounds, demons & fire giants)
• Access to machinery to craft Ferocious gloves
• Boots of stone requirement for non-donators
• Cannon placement limitations
• Blockable slayer tasks
• Drops (and pet)