How events are detected
Shakes & Fidget has two kinds of event, and Mercy SF treats them differently.
Server events are the weekend modifiers: an experience event, a gold event, a tightened epic drop chance. They change what the ordinary modules should prioritise, and they are visible in the game state whenever they are on.
The big timed events are separate pieces of game with their own screens, their own currency and their own progress: the World Boss, the Hellevator and the Legendary Dungeon. They appear for a week or two and then disappear.
Why "is it running" is the hard part
The obvious way to decide whether the World Boss is on is to look for World Boss data in the game state. That does not work, and it fails in the most expensive way possible: the server keeps sending the block long after the event has closed.
The result, before this was handled, was a module that sent its commands all day and had every one of them refused with event not active. One warning a minute, per account, and an Events screen that showed a finished event as though it were live.
Mercy SF uses two sources of truth, in this order.
- The event's own window, where the protocol gives one. The Hellevator and the Legendary Dungeon both carry a start and an end timestamp, so they can be answered exactly.
- The server's own verdict, where it does not. The World Boss has no window in the game state, so the only honest signal is the refusal itself. Once the server says the event is not running, that is believed for an hour, and then probed again in case a new one has started.
That hour is the whole trade. A closed event costs one request an hour instead of one a minute, and a newly opened one is joined within the hour rather than instantly.
What is deliberately not done
The game sends an eventstatus block with a numeric type code. Its timestamps are parsed and used. The code itself is not treated as a mapping to a specific event, because one observed value is not a mapping table, and guessing wrong would silently drive the wrong event's module against the wrong window.
The unlock probe
Gating strictly on detection deadlocked fresh accounts on the World Boss, and it is worth knowing why, because the symptom looks like a bug.
The server only sends the World Boss block once a character has joined the event. So a character that has never joined has no block, is never detected, and therefore never joins. The account sits there forever while unrelated requests come back with world boss join first.
Once a character clears the unlock level, Mercy SF therefore attempts to enter on a timer even when nothing has been detected, and lets the server decide. A refusal costs one request every few minutes and nothing else.
Event priority
Three settings decide how much the timed events are allowed to disturb the ordinary daily loop.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
event_priority_mode | on | While an event is live, its modules run before the ordinary ones in the cycle. |
event_ending_threshold_mins | 60 | How close to the end of an event counts as "ending soon", after which the event is prioritised harder. |
event_auto_beer_during_event | off | Allow beer to be spent on the thirst for adventure during an event. Off by default because beer is a limited daily resource and spending it is a preference, not a default. |
Server events and the daily loop
The ordinary modules read the running server events and adjust:
- an experience event moves the quest picker towards experience quests, so a double-experience weekend is not spent on silver;
- a gold event does the opposite;
- the daily rewards, calendar, wheel and dice are claimed regardless of what is running, because they cost nothing to take.
See Quests, tavern & expeditions for how the quest picker weighs an event against your standing preference, and Daily rewards & calendar for the claim loop.
Where each event is documented
- World Boss: catapult, ammunition, weak points and chests. The one with a mushroom button next to every other button, and the structural reason it is never pressed.
- Hellevator: climbing, key cards, and the treat shop that is the only lever on combat power up there.
- Legendary Dungeon: rooms, doors, blessings, curses, and the two mushroom ceilings on reviving.