I checked our Nautilus Harbor against the v83 client directly and could not find a missing NPC - so I need one more detail from you to chase this properly.

Map 120000000 in the v83 client has exactly 15 NPCs, and we ship all 15 at the same coordinates, all with working art. In order across the map:

x 666 Abel
x 959 News Stand
x 1037 Pupa
x 1364 Nautilus' Mid-Sized Taxi
x 2293 Rooney
x 2535 Agent E
x 2605 Donation Box
x 2688 Dalair
x 3856 Dimensional Mirror
x 4193 Bush
x 4326 Bush
x 4501 Bart (up on the observatory tower)
x 4577 Bush
x 4753 Bush
x 4834 Bush

Judging by your position on the minimap you were around x 4100-4300, which is the two Bushes at 4193 and 4326. Those really are NPCs in v83 (ids 1094002-1094006) and not scenery - they are marked hidden in the map data and the real client only reveals them during a pirate quest. So a bush you can see and cannot click may well be map scenery sitting on top of one.

Could you tell me which NPC you expected in each circle - by name, or by roughly which of the positions above? If it is one of the named ones (Bart, Abel, Pupa, Dalair, Agent E...) then something IS wrong and I will dig in; if it is the bushes, that is authentic behaviour and I will close it with the receipt.

CORRECTION / UPDATE — you were right, and my "can't reproduce" was too quick.

The owner pointed out the decisive thing I had in front of me and misread: those NPCs SHOW ON THE MINIMAP. Minimap markers are drawn from NPCs that actually spawned, so the spawn is fine and the map data is fine (all 15 of v83's are there at the right coordinates). The problem is that they are not RENDERING — an invisible NPC you cannot click.

And there is a concrete lead. Of the 15 NPCs on Nautilus Harbor, only 6 have their sprites shipped inside the game's own art bundle: Dalair, Agent E, the News Stand, Rooney, the Dimensional Mirror, and one of the bushes. The other NINE — Bart, Abel, Pupa, the Nautilus Taxi, the Donation Box and four of the five bushes — carry no local copy at all and depend entirely on the art CDN, which is known to refuse a lot of classic sprites. When that fetch fails there is no fallback, so you get exactly what you photographed: a spawned, minimap-visible, unclickable nothing.

Both NPCs you circled (around x=4193 and x=4326) are in that nine.

So: CONFIRMED, not can't-repro. The fix is to ship those sprites locally instead of trusting the CDN, and to make a failed NPC sprite load loud instead of silent. Sorry for bouncing it back to you.

FIXED — and your report found a hole that was affecting far more than Nautilus.

Root cause: the sprite code had a guard for "the first frame has no texture at all", and separately survived a PARTIAL load failure by animating over whatever frames did arrive. Nothing owned the case in between. When the art server refuses EVERY frame, each one is replaced by a 1x1 placeholder, all of them get filtered out as dead, the render plan comes out empty — and the code went on to build a sprite with no frames anyway. That is an invisible NPC that still has a nametag and a talk zone fitted to nothing, which is exactly what you photographed and exactly why it was not clickable.

An empty plan now falls back to the same substitute sprite the two neighbouring guards already use, so an NPC can no longer end up as nothing.

The scale, since it explains why this bit Nautilus so hard: 950 of the 1,815 NPCs placed across the shipped maps have no sprite stored in the game itself and depend entirely on the art server. On Nautilus Harbor that is 9 of the 15 — including both of the ones you circled. Shipping those sprites locally is the real cure and is a separate, larger job.

On the dev branch, live at the next publish. Thanks for pushing back on my "can't reproduce" — you were right.