Two new kinds of protected area went live across every AfterHours server today: safe zones, where you cannot be harmed, and military no-build areas, where the loot stays contested but the ground stays clear.

Altar and Green Mountain are now safe zones. Inside them, weapons do nothing. No player can damage another, nothing can be raided, and no fires can be lit. You also cannot build, place tents, storage or fireplaces, or interact with locks. They are meeting grounds, not staging grounds. We have also put a well in each one, so you can drink and fill up without leaving cover.

Thirteen military locations are now no-build areas: Tisy, North West Airfield, Krasnostav Airfield, Kamensk, Balota Airfield, Vybor, Myshkino Tents, Pavlovo, Rify, Tri Kresta, Zelenogorsk, Stary Sobor and Kamenka.

The important part is what has NOT changed there. Combat is untouched and you can still light fires and drop tents and storage. The only thing blocked is permanent building. These are high-value military areas and they should stay fought over rather than walled off.

You will now get a message when entering or leaving any of these areas, so there is no guessing about whether you are inside a border. If a build action is refused, the message tells you why.

Lock handling was rebuilt at the same time. Your own combination locks now open for you without dialling the code and anyone trying to brute-force someone else's lock runs into a hard limit of fifty attempts, after which it drips back at two attempts a minute. Lock messages now appear in the centre of your screen instead of the chat feed, where they were easy to miss.