Mold outbreak

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The mold outbreak (stylized on the main website as a "mold outbrak") was the 2022 April Fool's Day prank. The prank was centered around a "mold outbreak", which allegedly began when a batch of cookies was left in a Jim's Storage Cell in Tranquil Forest for 20 minutes longer than it should have, before being served on three runs of the BluRail Wall Shuttle service in Sealane, thus exposing the entire world to mold spores.

A website post and Discord announcement were created to inform players of the mold outbreak and to exercise caution.

The mold outbreak was made possible by a custom plugin created by DintyB and chiefbozx.

Effects of mold outbreak

Every 10 minutes, the Mold plugin would randomly select a letter of the English alphabet to be banned. Any chat messages that included a banned letter would go through, but would have the banned letter(s) removed. For example, if the letter E was banned, then the message hello would display in chat as hllo.

Once a configurable limit of letters had been reached (in this case, 6 letters), the plugin would randomly choose a ban letter and unban it halfway between each letter banning. For example, if the banned letter list was R, S, T, L, N, and E, the plugin would randomly choose one of those six letters to unban before banning another letter.

To avoid allowing players to use accented or alternate-language lookalike characters to bypass the bans, all Unicode characters above code point U+007F were banned during the mold outbreak, regardless of whether they have a "base" letter that was subject to the mold bans.

Private messages and messages sent from Discord were not affected.

The Discord announcement also warned players that symptoms may include "an unnatural affection towards tacos" and "dragonitis", though it is unclear exactly what, if anything, these reported symptoms actually mean.