Confirmed. The Maple Administrator has two different sprite sets registered against one id and the renderer alternates between them per frame. The game-side half is fixed. Leaving IN PROGRESS because the rest of the fix is in the asset mirror rather than the game, and that is a separate deploy — the mirror archive for this id is mixed-source and needs the duplicate set removing so only the MSU version with the N on the hat survives, which is the one you asked to keep. Nothing to re-test until that runs; I will say when it has.

Closing this — and the blocker note that has been sitting on it was stale.

The mirror deploy DID run, back on 18 August, and I re-verified the LIVE bytes today. Every frame of 9010000, 0021000 and 0011000 now comes from a single source, and every frame of a given NPC is the same size as its siblings, which is what the blink was: two redraws of different dimensions alternating in the idle loop. The reported symptom is fixed in production.

ONE THING YOU SHOULD KNOW, because it is a real cost and I would rather say it than let you find it. The way that fix made the archive uniform was by letting the newer art own EVERY frame. So those three NPCs now draw the modern redraw rather than the v83 original — different figures, at different sizes, and because the sprite is placed from its own origin they also sit a few pixels off their foothold. The Maple Administrator is a man in a white cap in v83, and Pan is a small bald man in blue overalls; neither is what you see today. Pan in particular is on Maple Island in front of every new character.

That is a different bug from the one you reported, so I am closing this one and carrying the art-parity half separately. The authentic frames are recoverable — one of the three is already sitting correctly in our own shipped art bundle, unused — so it is a data repair, not a hunt.

If the blink itself ever comes back, reopen this.

Follow-up: the art-parity half I flagged when closing this is now shipped too.

The three NPCs are v83's own again, extracted from the binary client:
- 9010000 (Maple Administrator): 46x76 -> the real 46x69 at origin (23,69), and FOUR stand nodes instead of seven. Frames 4-6 have never existed in any v83 client; frames 2 and 3 are links back to 0 and 1, which is what the two-frame blink actually is.
- 0021000 (Pan): the real 35x57 at origin (17,57), one frame.
- 0011000 (Lisa): the real 51x79 at origin (25,79), one frame.

That also fixes a second, quieter thing: placement subtracts the sprite's own origin, so a wrong origin stood all three 6-12px off their foothold. Pan in particular is on Maple Island in front of every new character.

One structural fix came with it, because it is what made a per-frame restore impossible before: the loader only consulted our local art bundle when an NPC's ENTIRE plan was local. These three still need the mirror for their other states, so a single restored frame was unreachable. Every frame now checks the bundle first and falls back to the mirror, and a cold cache warms itself instead of silently serving the mirror's copy.

LIVE on the published build. Worth a look next time you are on Maple Island — Pan should be a small bald man in blue overalls, not the figure with the barrel.