It’s been a busy 2026 so far here at Elthos HQ. If the Mythos Machine were a physical engine, for most of the year you would have seen the floor would covered in oil, bolts, and spare parts I realized I didn’t actually need, or wanted to remodel for better efficiency.
From wrestling with the "ghosts" in Microsoft SQL Server to streamlining how GMs manage their worlds, this spring has been all about database coherency, data cleansing, and UI polish. Here’s the breakdown of what’s been happening under the hood.
The Great Database Scrub
I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a neat freak. Over the years, a few inconsistencies crept into the database schema. While it wasn't breaking anything, it was making future automation look like more of a headache than it should be.
Coherency Update: I renamed 19 columns across 7 tables and updated all related stored procedures. Everything is once again "nice and neat and clean and shiny." Now while in a single sentence that makes it sound like an easy task. Not so, friends! Not so. It was a trail by blood and fire. But in the end, with clever SQL methods I invented for this purpose, I finally managed to not only update the database and make it squeaky clean, but I updated both Test and Production with the changes (also not as easy a task as it sounds from a distance). Done!
The SQL Server "Identity Jump" Saga: A while back, maybe a year ago or so, I went down the rabbit hole of why IDs were jumping by 1,000 or 10,000 after server reboots. It annoyed me that these jumps effectively meant I would have fewer rows available in my database tables. I blamed fiendish Microsoft for "stealing" my table's maximum sizes. Those bastards. However, my "fix" (using
RESEED) actually created a subtle bug with orphaned records in cross-reference tables. Lesson learned: I’ve removed the re-seeding, fixed the orphaned record logic, updated all tables involved, and testing shows everything is now perfectly aligned. Meh, ok. You win this round Microsoft! Bastards.
The goal of the Mythos Machine is to do the number crunching for you so you can focus on the characters and story of your World(s). We’ve made a few quality-of-life updates to that end:
Adventure Group Filtering: In Player Mode, GMs with dozens of NPCs were getting buried in a single long dropdown list. You can now filter characters by Adventure Group, making it much faster to find the right sheet in the heat of a session.
Weapon-Skill Cloning: Fixed a bug where cloning a world into a new genre would occasionally miss weapon-skill combinations. It now correctly pulls from your specific world parameters rather than defaulting to the Elthos base world.
Information Screen Revamp: We’ve moved player functions over to the Player Mode page, leaving the Info screen cleaner and more focused.
- AI Image Generation: Our AI host changed their backend, which broke the "Place AI Image" generation tool. I’ve refactored the code, and your world-building visuals creation thingie is back online. Nice.
- The "Body Things" Logic: Previously, if you removed a metal shield while the "Body Things" store was selected, the shield would get "sold" into the body store (which made for some very confused merchants). Now, natural items are simply dropped instead of cluttering up the biological inventory. After removing a Body weapon or armor from a character I then found that I had to go delete the darn thing from the Body Things store. Meh. Now it's much cleaner and less confusing.
- Session Management: To counter some aggressive ISP timeouts, I’ve shortened the "keep-alive" heartbeat to 4 minutes and 20 seconds. I am hoping this will help prevent timeouts from ending your session prematurely. Time will tell. Haha, get it? Time will ... um ... okay, never mind.
It feels good to have the machine running lean and mean again. These foundational fixes pave the way for some much larger automation features I have planned for later this year.
Happy Gaming!
To learn more about Mythos Machine (and you definitely should), please visit my website where I talk about Elthos RPG and Mythos Machine at length.
https://Elthos.com
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