Shintolin

Explore. Settle. Trade. Conquer.

Hunt, or farm. Fight, or heal. Build, or conquer. Join fellow players in a free, persistent browser-based world.

Humanity has wandered the world of Shintolin for millenia, hunting and gathering to survive. But some grow tired of the nomadic life, and are beginning to settle down. Forests make way for farmland, villages grow into towns and cities, and civilizations seek wealth, power, and glory.

Current date: Mid Autumn 531 SR
Player Characters: 11
Settlements: 0
Map size: 551
Newest character: Lusis

Latest news:

Version 2026.11.11

Published:

I have been silent for a while, but I did not completely stop working on Quintolin — I just did not have enough mental energy to write proper announcements or release notes, and I was just releasing random half-finished patches haphazardly in the background.

This article summarizes the most important changes since the previous official version./

  • The game was temporarily locked down during the recent “security black week” (news about PHP2Shell and some other infamous vulnerabilities).
  • The game code have been upgraded to the latest versions of the PHP language and third-party packages. Internal architecture has also been heavily reorganized, hopefully for the better instead of for the worse.
  • The game now stores its data in an external service (PostgreSQL) instead of a local SQLite file.
  • Fixed a series of embarrassing bugs related to character status calculations. Characters should now correctly display as active, idle, dazed, or dead depending on their situation. Characters belonging to returning players should no longer automatically die on every tick.
  • Fixed a bug in the item use code, where amount of restored health was calculated based on the healer’s health instead of the patient’s health.
  • Fixed a brief-but-serious bug where the game was never saving changes in character data.
  • Fixed a potential crash in the “remember details of my last action” user interface feature.
  • User registration and authentication code has been hardened against potential exploits. Among other things, the “remember me” login feature has been reconfigured to remember an absent user for just one month instead of a longer period.
  • Modified homepage statistics to include idle, dazed, and dead characters in the character counter, and to exclude ocean tiles in the map size counter.

Version 2026.08.02

Published:

This is a technical release, most of the changes are internal and should not be noticeable by players.

  • Fixed a bug where special characters like quotation marks or apostrophes were not displayed correctly in the post-action message bar. Hat tip to Liche for reporting it.
  • Changed internal toolset used in developer work (hello Mago, bye bye PHPStan and pretty-php). Scanned all existing code with the new static analyser. Fixed all reported bugs and other mistakes.
  • Upgraded project to use the latest version of the Symfony framework.
  • Converted all database communication to use the Doctrine library instead of hand-made raw SQL queries.

Version 2026.05.28

Published:

  • Fixed a bug where it was impossible to revitalise a character that had an empty hunger bar or no hunger debuffs.
  • Fixed a bug where a killed creature was not removed immediately from the game and existed as a “ghost” until the next daily tick. Another hat tip to Liche for reporting the issue.

Version 2026.05.27

Published:

  • Revitalisation items and self-revitalisation action have been modified to not only restore current health, but also partially heal hunger and its effect on maximum health.

Version 2026.05.26

Published:

  • Fixed a bug where learning a skill costed more experience than what was displayed in user interface.
  • Updated game interface to remember selected action data (search count, attack target, etc) between page views.