AtomicBlue devs have announced an early Christmas gift for all of their players: PlaneShift has been updated with several important new features. Included in the milestone update are also several enhancement and bug fixes. The new patch brings the game to v0.5.5, one step closer to the upcoming major v0.6.0 patch.

New features:

• Characters turn transparent while sneaking to simulate the fact they are hidden. We are testing this new option, and we plan to use it also for spells or other situations
• Added "pterosaur services" for travelling between cities. There is one beastmaster in each major town which rents pterosaurs for travel
• Made shields functional. They are now part of the combat calculation, and allow real blocking of hits
• Improved the way NPCs chase an opponent by using generated paths (navmeshes) for navigation. This is a major improvement to combat and allows them to walk around obstacles
• Weather has been known to be cause of crashes on certain hardware, mainly intel chips and to slow down gameplay. It's now possible to disable weather effects from pslaunch! Be sure to enable it and test if it works for you before giving up on it!
• Added improved snow effect. Snow now shows on ground! Start humming a Christmas song :)
• Added the new Klyros city Amdeneir! It's actually one quarter of the city, which is located to the "left" of hydlaa, for now reacheable only by pterosaur travel
• Added animations for attacking with bows on all characters
• Added a new progress bar for crafting

Read the full patch notes here.