v0.26.0 ·
The Right Tool
Tailoring and leatherworking read as one family again
The last release gave both professions new material families and left the gear behind, so a single tier could print four different words. Tier 3 leather gear said Wolf, Leather, Boiled and Scaled while its material was Scaled Leather. Tier 4 said Tough, Leather and Dire. Tier 5 said Dire, which is tier 4’s family, so one word pointed at two tiers. Worst of all, "Sew Wolf Leather Vest" handed you a Boiled Leather Vest, so the recipe and the item named different families for the same craft. Every tier is now one word from the panel header to the material to the finished piece: Wolf, Bristled, Scaled, Dire, Wight-shroud and Drake leather, and Linen, Silkweave, Mageweave, Storm-cloth, Frostbloom and Magister cloth.
The Codex tells you where anything comes from
Items reach you through eight different channels and the Codex only knew about two of them: crafting recipes and ordinary monster loot. Hides roll on their own separate chance, dungeon bosses have their own tables, guild clears have their own pools, quality crafting mints its own versions, shops sell things and quests award things. None of those were understood, so roughly eight hundred items showed no Sources panel whatsoever, and an empty panel reads as "this does not drop" rather than "we did not check". Blighthide was the one that gave it away: it comes only from hide rolls, so nothing in the game would tell you where to find it. Every channel is now read, so every item names its source.
Every hide has real, reachable sources
Hide drops promised four or more open-world sources at every tier and nothing verified that promise, so it was quietly false: tier 1 had only three, because one of its wolves existed solely inside a dungeon where most players would never meet it. Every tier now genuinely meets the floor with creatures you can walk to, that wolf among them, roaming the Vireldan Crownlands. The promise is checked on every build rather than trusted.
Nine recipes were pointing at the wrong tier
"Cut Dire Leather Strips" sat at level 60 and produced Wight-shroud Cord, while Dire is the level 45 family. One step was named after a house set piece it had nothing to do with, and one printed a raw internal item code straight at you. All nine now name what they actually make.
Hide drops were paying up to four times over
The new hides had been added to the ordinary loot table of eighteen creatures that already rolled them on their own separate chance, so both fired on a single kill. The Ogre Passbreaker was yielding nearly five times its intended rate and not one of the eighteen was under one and a half times. Hides now drop once, at the designed rate. If tanning felt suspiciously easy last patch, this is why, and it will feel slower now.
An archer’s power lives in the arrows now
Standard arrows dealt 1 to 7 damage across the whole game while poison arrows dealt 11 to 135, so the plain arrow was strictly pointless and nobody had a reason to make one. Arrows now carry about a third of a shot and the bow itself has come down to keep your total damage where it was calibrated. The practical change is that which arrow you nock now matters: the damage arrow is decisively better against mail, poison is decisively better against plate, and the two are close enough on cloth and leather that neither is a trap. Rogues keep poison as pure upside. Archers get to choose.
The spear finally beats something
Two-handers are meant to be a three-way choice: greatswords shred cloth and leather, spears slip through mail, mauls break plate. The maul was carrying almost a fifth more damage than its share, which swallowed the whole advantage piercing has against mail, so there was no armour anywhere in the game that the spear was the right answer to. All three now sit level, and each one wins the fight it is supposed to win.
Daggers hit harder
Seven named boss weapons were carrying a hidden attack speed bonus that no other weapon gets and that their damage had already been paid for. Removing it cost daggers the most, since three of the seven were daggers, so dagger damage has gone up about a tenth to give that back. The speed came off the items and went back into damage, where you can see it.
Named and epic gear sits where its rarity says
Nineteen boss drops still had hand-written numbers from before the rarity rules existed, and they missed in both directions. One green chestpiece was beating the blue on its own line; another piece added nothing at all over its common. The three house set cloaks were governed by nothing, so a tier 6 epic cloak had less defence than the plain cloak of the same tier. All of it is now derived. Some pieces went up, a few came down, and none of them lie about their colour any more.
The Sovereign focus can actually be built
The tier 6 Mana capstone needed a reagent that nothing in the world produced. Not rare, not hard to reach, simply absent, so the recipe could never be run by anyone. It drops from tier 5 and tier 6 meditation now.
Restoratives are worth the slot
A restorative gave you sixty percent of both bars, and since you have three quick slots you could just carry a heal and a mana potion instead and be better off on each. It is seventy-two percent now, which makes it the correct pick if you draw on both bars, while the single potions stay clearly better if you only use one.
Wolf hides drop like every other hide
Every other tier’s hide comes off its own roll, separate from the creature’s normal loot. Wolf Hide came off the ordinary drop table, which is why it behaved differently from the five above it for no reason a player could see. It now works the same way, at the same rate the other tiers use, which is a little lower than the wolf line paid before. Reclaiming hide from leather scrap is unchanged.
New artwork for the whole leather chain
The hides, tanned leathers and cords were a mix of two different art sets and never looked related. All eighteen are redrawn as one family: each tier shows the pelt with its fur or scales still on, then the same skin cured flat, then that leather cut into cord.
Fixes
- The Codex described leather armour as "a balanced 10-20% off everything". The real numbers, rendered in the table directly above that sentence, run from 5% to 40%: leather shrugs off blunt force well and barely blunts a blade. The caption now says what the table says. It is advice you act on when deciding what to wear.
- The Sentinel cloak had been given health and damage reduction by a slot that carries neither, which made it roughly twice as strong as its own line allows. It is corrected. Tank durability itself was never the problem: the measurement behind that concern turned out to be dressing the tank in an epic guild-boss shield it should never have had.
- Leather Scrap and Iron Scrap dropped from ninety-seven creatures between them and no recipe anywhere consumed either one. Both are spent now, scrap leather into reclaimed hide and iron scrap into bars.
- Four items existed that could never be obtained by anyone: High Quality and Masterwork versions of the wooden shield and the concealed blade, neither of which has a recipe to craft a quality version from. They were listed in the Codex as though they were reachable.
- Cooked Trout, Cooked Pike and Cooked Salmon could not be eaten. They cooked, they sold, they sat in your bag, and there was no way to put them in a quick slot. The whole tier 1 to tier 3 fishing and cooking line paid you food you could not use.
- Cook Spiny Crab produced Cooked Pike, the same fish the pike recipe makes. Crab meat now cooks into its own dish.
- The Passbreaker’s Maul was tier 6 gear dropped by a tier 4 boss, which handed you a weapon two tiers above the fight you won. It is a tier 4 trophy now, and the Boundary Marker was corrected the other way.
- The Concealed Blade, a tier 3 weapon, dropped from tier 1 knife-fighters, and the Palace Assassin was the most reliable source of it in the game. Tier 1 opponents drop tier 1 goods now.
- Mountain Pelt was a tier 3 material whose only use was a tier 5 recipe, so the ladder had a two tier hole in the middle of it. It is a tier 5 material with tier 5 and tier 6 sources.
- Potion recipes were named Greater and Royal while the potions themselves were named Potent and Superior, so the crafting panel and your bag disagreed about what you were making. Nine recipes renamed to match the bottles.
- Tier 1 cloth gear was called Cloth in your bag and Linen in the tailoring panel, and two different pairs of gloves at two different levels both read as Linen Wraps. Tier 1 is Linen everywhere and tier 2 gloves are Silkweave, as the rest of their sets already were.
- Leather Leggings were the only rung of the leather line that did not name its material. They are Bristled Leather Leggings, and three more recipes now name what they produce instead of what goes into them.
- A tier 2 ghoul dropped a tier 4 reagent and a tier 2 boss dropped a tier 4 gem. Both now pay out on their own tier.
- Bound Sigils and Skeleton Dust dropped from dozens of creatures and nothing anywhere consumed them. Both are spent by Mana focus recipes now.