GU54 will be released on December 9, 2009. Frostfell will be released on December 10, 2009

• This information comes from the current updates on the Test server. Things can/do/will change on Test, several times, before an update goes live. Be prepared for that!
• If you find something you feel strongly about in this preview, now is the time to provide feedback to the developers. The testing phase is when it is the easiest to make fixes and tweaks to upcoming content, and SOE has a handy In Testing Feedback forum for just such a reason.
• As mentioned above, things can/will change while on Test. I'll do the best I can, when tracking this many details, to update this overview with changes and additions, and will note any updates at the bottom of this preview, to make it easier to find them. However, there's only so much I can juggle, so you may want to keep an eye on the patch notes posted on the SOE forums, plus the Dev Tracker feature on those same forums.
• When I have confirmed release dates, I will post them, until then, at a guess, about all I can say is "mid December-ish"

Patch Notes - Condensed!

I've taken the liberty of condensing the full Test patch notes into something a bit more relevant to crafters and housing junkies. It still makes for a pretty huge list, but, thankfully, not all of them need extra explanation! I've also juggled the order of listing them a bit, to make it a bit easier to sort through.

• The Far Seas Trading Company has been looking for ways to stimulate business. You may notice their caravans or ships arrive at a city near you in the near future!
• Questgivers and merchants in the enchanted grottos will now also vanish when their mushroom rings vanish.
• The cleansing water for the quest "Pollution Problem" is now removed upon quest completion.
• Merchants in some of the Enchanted Grottos have acquired some new items to trade.
• A permanent portal to the Shard of Love has been established within Everfrost for adventurers of 50 seasons and above!
• Now Erollisi's Lost Longbow, the Longbow of Valor, the Buckler of the Broken Heart and the Tower of Love can each be turned into a trophy item to be placed within your house.
• Volwon in Bathezid�s Watch and Zhary in Riliss are seeking assistance from crafters who have been properly introduced to their faction by Greeblentus, but who have not yet achieved ally status.
• Sziths in the Danak Shipyards is seeking assistance from crafters who have been properly introduced to the Legion by Greeblentus, but who have not yet achieved ally status.
• Harvest items in the tradeskill group instances now stack to 200 (instead of 20).
• Tradeskill group missions now reward guild status points in addition to the other rewards.
• The tradeskill quest �Far Seas Supply Division - Rescuing the Relics� is now a persistent instance, but requires fewer statues, and has an additional reward.
• Carpenters are now able to create rare mahogany strong boxes.
• Level 40 and 44 carpenter writ quests are now offered in ascending order instead of being reversed in the dialog.
• The figurines offered for completing the Chronomancer missions should now be available any time after you finish that mission. You will need to complete the mission once more for the plushie to become available to you, however.
• You can now pack automentor reward house items into your moving crate. You can also return these items to owner.
• Thunked a number of ore nodes in Kylong Plains to the ground.
• Harvesting nodes in Nektulos Forest have been relocated. Harvesting objects should no longer appear on top of trees or inside rocks.
• Great care should be taken when traveling the Sinking Sands; its denizens have become more formidable.
• You can now add comments to your house load files. Just start the line with //. For example: �//gnomes are awesome�
• Hair of the Dog will now suspend mounts while the effect is active.
• The Boarfiend Refuse Shovel will no longer poke through walls in homes and guild halls.
• You can now destroy an item from your overflow slot.
• Plant fertilizer/bone/water and faction loot items now stack to 200.
• The Mechanized Platinum Repository of Reconstruction no longer displays charges, as it does not have charges.
• The item �Blanket of Fog� should not lose its icon when placing it if placed more than once.
• Items that have an item level above the max level in game will now show when doing a default broker search.
• Deputy Hopple in Enchanted Lands should now require you to actually have the Wild Apple Muffins he requested when turning the quest in.

On top of things that haven't made it onto Test yet (like the event that causes some hubub in West Freeport), there are a couple things already on Test not mentioned in the patch notes, like crafted backpacks getting more oomph, and, oh, gee ... Frostfell, perhaps?

Make sure you're comfy in that chair, and your drool cloth is handy, as we dive into a deeper look at all of the above!

Events

City Festivals!

• The Far Seas Trading Company has been looking for ways to stimulate business. You may notice their caravans or ships arrive at a city near you in the near future!

The Far Seas Trading Company loves to make money (who doesn't?!), and they have settled on a lovely way to bring in some extra coin. A traveling Faire that will visit a different city each month, with all sorts of wonderful things to buy. Some of the items will be city-specific, others will be a regular part of their offerings.

The Cliff Notes version the event: once a month, a festival will set up outside a main city (The event started on Test with Qeynos, but we are unsure which city will host the first one on live servers, sometime in January.) The festival will last for one week, and there will be vendors with: temporary appearance slot clothing, permanent house items and appearance clothing, food & drink and one city-specific furniture vendor. There will also be a quest NPC from whom you can earn heirloom city tokens that can be spent at not only the current festival, but any future festival. The festival sets up far enough away from the gates to be safe from patrolling guards, for those who are disliked in that city. The current host city will also have a special purple glowie collection during the event. Once the week is over, the festival closes up shop, and disappears until the next month, where it will appear in another city.

Update: Unlike past events, where you're scrambling to get tokens within a limited timeframe, you should have plenty of time to stockpile before, during and after each event. Once GU54 goes live, you will be able to earn tokens, whether the festival is active or not, by completing city & tradeskill writs. Yes, we mean you can earn tokens before the first festival even starts!

That's all well and good for those who tend to skim previews (and thus miss a lot of important little details), but for those of you who want something meatier about this upcoming new event, check out the City Festivals event writeup.

Update: It is expected that the first City Festival will occur in January, so as not to collide with Frostfell.

Frostfell!

Edit: For those who are new to Frostfell in Norrath, here is a brief introduction to the event. If you'd rather, you can hop directly to the Frostfell 2009 Craftables Gallery. Added note: 13 items that had been discontinued from earlier years have been added to the new recipe books, including some stockings, candles, sconces, eggnog and cranberries!

Enchanted Grottos

• Questgivers and merchants in the enchanted grottos will now also vanish when their mushroom rings vanish.
• The cleansing water for the quest "Pollution Problem" is now removed upon quest completion.
• Merchants in some of the Enchanted Grottos have acquired some new items to trade.

When you combine all of the above together, you will no longer be able to camp in an grotto instance for days on end, waiting for the new items to be patched to the live servers (thus getting the items between-events, before the rest of the server can get them), you won't have to keep deleting the cleansing water after running through cleaning up corrupted naiads, and we'll be seeing some new items on the vendors "soon".

In addition, there are five new items that will be available on the grotto merchants. (Three in Antonica, one in Darklight Woods, one in Nek) We'll have size comparisons for you later, but here, hot off the presses after the event hit Test, here's what is in store for us:

Watery Platform	Cloudy Square	Crystal Mosaic Square	Starry Square
Stony Lichen Square

Note that these items are solid and have texture from the underside as well as the top. (I've already seen a lovely cloudy "sky" as the ceiling in one room of a Test guildhall!)

If you aren't familiar with this monthly event, you can check out the Moonlight Enchantments guide in the Events section of the site.

Shard of Love

• A permanent portal to the Shard of Love has been established within Everfrost for adventurers of 50 seasons and above!
• Now Erollisi's Lost Longbow, the Longbow of Valor, the Buckler of the Broken Heart and the Tower of Love can each be turned into a trophy item to be placed within your house.

The access quest for the Shard of Love will be removed when GU54 goes live, so if you want to get the rewards/xp/aa from doing the quest, do so now! Once this goes live, any adventurer level 50 or above can access the zone without need for the access quest.

Quellithulian Spires

"Prelude Event"

Strange events are afoot in Qeynos and Freeport! Intrepid adventurers should seek out Royal Librarian Brinn in Qeynos Harbor and Sir Tallen Yevix in West Freeport.

Crafting Faction/Quests

New Ways to RoK Faction

• Volwon in Bathezid�s Watch and Zhary in Riliss are seeking assistance from crafters who have been properly introduced to their faction by Greeblentus, but who have not yet achieved ally status.
• Sziths in the Danak Shipyards is seeking assistance from crafters who have been properly introduced to the Legion by Greeblentus, but who have not yet achieved ally status.

This part of the patch notes will apparently be changing a bit. Kunark crafting factions, which used to only allow crafters to craft their way to warmly, will now allow them to quest to ally status!

But wait, there's more! Tired of grinding Bathezid's Watch, Riliss and Danak Shipyards faction over and over with those above-mentioned crafting writs? New daily quests will be offered in each of these three Kunarkian areas that allow crafters to get away from the crafting area and earn faction and coin.

You must have first completed New Lands, New Profits in order to obtain the Bathezid and Riliss quests, and then High Risks, Higher Profits in order to obtain the Danak quest.

You will be able to obtain one quest per faction per day (so 3 quests a day if you do all 3 factions), and the quests cycle through several offerings. Update: While there may be some changes and additions, you can find the RoK Daily Faction Quests writeup here

Far Seas Supply Division Faction

• Harvest items in the tradeskill group instances now stack to 200 (instead of 20).
• Tradeskill group missions now reward guild status points in addition to the other rewards.
• The tradeskill quest �Far Seas Supply Division - Rescuing the Relics� is now a persistent instance, but requires fewer statues, and has an additional reward.

Guild status for doing crafting missions? Yippee! From what I've seen on Test, it will be 15987 status points as a level 80 crafter.

With regards to Rescuing the Relics, I haven't seen it cycle through yet on Test. However, the changes mentioned above mean that you can no longer /camp or zone out to reset the instance if you can't find the last few relics, but you also won't need to find the entire 50 anymore.

Further details on Far Seas Supply Division quests, for those unfamiliar with them, can be found here.

Other Stuff Requiring Comments

Storage Space!

• Carpenters are now able to create rare mahogany strong boxes.

40-slot strongboxes, how yummy! However, tailors are not left out! It didn't make it into the patch notes, but all tailored back packs have been increased in storage size to match the strongboxes from the same tier. Strongboxes have also had their weight changed from 100 to 10.

Automentoring

• The figurines offered for completing the Chronomancer missions should now be available any time after you finish that mission. You will need to complete the mission once more for the plushie to become available to you, however.
• You can now pack automentor reward house items into your moving crate. You can also return these items to owner.

Those completing the missions from the Chronomancers were able to purchase a plushie to celebrate the event, but only on the day that they completed the mission. Due to how missions are tracked in the quest journal (deleted after completion, so you can repeat it on the next cycle through), the vendors weren't able to keep track of past accomplishments. While this has now been fixed going forward, after this patch you'll have to repeat any mission for which you want the plushie, in order for it to be properly recorded.

What, you didn't know about the plushies? Elquinjena did up a writeup about the Chronomage Missions and Rewards.

Harvesting

• Thunked a number of ore nodes in Kylong Plains to the ground.
• Harvesting nodes in Nektulos Forest have been relocated. Harvesting objects should no longer appear on top of trees or inside rocks.
• Great care should be taken when traveling the Sinking Sands; its denizens have become more formidable.

No more trying to climb trees in order to harvest stuff in Nek Forest, nor watching the incredible levitating ore nodes in KP. However, if you're harvesting in Sinking Sands, you may want to scout a bit more carefully for a handy palm tree to climb, as some mobs are a bit more feisty/nasty than they were before!

Housing Layout Files

• You can now add comments to your house load files. Just start the line with //. For example: �//gnomes are awesome�

I suspect most of us could find much more suitable notes to leave in our housing layout files, to make it easier to remember which layout was for which special design and such! :P

Hair Of the Dog

• Hair of the Dog will now suspend mounts while the effect is active.

Also known as "Mounts will dump you on your rump if you try to ride while intoxicated" (Hair of the dog is a quested "fun" recipe that provisioners can earn/make, that makes you appear to fall down drunk. Practice safe drinking, and don't drink and ride, k? :D)

More December Additions

• Crafters may begin working towards a new achievement for the creation of seventy-five thousand pristine items.
• Cure potions should now have different icons making finding them on a hotbar much easier
• Fermented pomegranates, fresh pomegranates, fresh-cut roses and Erollisi coin now stack to 200. (Merged in from other patch lines, the Frozen Token of E'ci also stacks to 200, along with being heirloom)

75,000?!

Cure Potions

• Noxious remedy = green
• Elemental remedy = yellow
• Arcane remedy = purple
• Trauma remedy = red

Corrections, Updates and Additions

• November 13: the Glacial Furniture page mentioned in the Events section of the writeup contains not only our standard "icon"-size images of the new offerings on that vendor, but also size comparison images. Thanks, Kaisha! Also dropped in the icon for one new Enchanted Grotto item in this preview, so folks could see the incoming Watery Platform.
• November 17: Frostfell information has been dropped into place.
• November 17: City Festivals - important notes about tokens for writs, also updated with expected January launch of the event. RoK Crafting Factions - added a correction from initial patch notes
• November 20: Added images for the new grotto additions, now that those items are available on Test.
• December 4: A lot of updates are headed your way, so hold onto your hats! I've put up a quick run-down of the RoK daily faction quests, and am now working on several other updates, including more Frostfell and City Festival images. I'll add more details once I am done with the 70+ images that Kaisha lobbed at me this week!
• December 4: Added a few things from the December 2 Test patch notes, including brief mention of the prelude event in the events section, and a few other odds and ends mentioned directly above this updates section
• December 4: Added more size comparison images to the City Events article, the Qeynos City Event gallery, the Icy Keep furniture gallery and the various Moonlight Enchantments guides. Information on 13 old retired Frostfell craftables that have been added to new books has also gone into the Frostfell 2009 craftables gallery
• Dec 4: A size comparison gallery for Frostfell 2009 craftables is being put up. 20 items have been added to it so far, with more to come as time permits.
• Dec. 9: The servers should be coming up any moment now from the GU54 patch. A couple clothing images have been added to the City Festival page, the black candle images have been added to the Frostfell page, and the ginormous patch notes are up.