Dev Server Updates - November 2025

November 21

• Dungeon skylights no longer render Ember Drift decals.

• Rewrote the cobweb shader to be a bit more dynamic and responsive to the wind (will be more visible when weather comes).

• Updated Eyeball shader to play nicer with particle systems.

• Resized a number of icons to reduce memory footprint in prep for more texture atlases.

• Numerous texture quality settings updates.

• Lower level quillbacks no longer count for Stinging Quillbacks Bulletin Board Task.

• Increased rapier damage.

• Added additional auto follow cancelled types (mouse, confusion).

• Added hunting log for grubs.

November 18

Characters have been migrated from Live as of Nov 18, 2025 at 1pm Central.

Fixes:

• Fixed incorrect stat amount on "Essence Guardian Ring Adornment".

• Fixed incorrect emote text from Essence Grub AoE root.

• Fixed issues with Emberfly spawning animation not playing if they were out of the camera fustrum.

Updates:

• New Snare VFX

• Improved consistency of spawn rate for Essence Gorgers.

• Improved location description for "Club Scouts" Bulletin Board Task.

• Supporters now have 1 additional health!

• Resilience functionality has been revamped for players. It continues to grant the player a chance at a death save. However, each successive death save puts a stacking debuff on the player reducing their resilience by 5 for a few minutes.

• Juggernaut's No Time To Die hs been updated to grant increasing amounts of Resilience for each rank. It starts at +200 and increases to +250. With the -5 per stack debuff on each save NTTD will start having a chance to fail after 20-30 consecutive saves depending on its rank. More saves are possible with +Resilience gear. These value are subject to balance changes.

Ibaxus:

• Fixed an issue where inner armor Adornments would lose their role requirements after being shaped.

• New Ibaxian recipes available for Archibald for "Ibaxian Reclamation". These recipes allow you to get that tier's artifact back from a shaped adornment.

• New Ibaxian Runes are now available for +Chemical Damage.

• Striker's Ibaxian set bonus now includes +Chemical Damage.

• Parry/Block cap values have been increased to 100% in Ibaxus.

New Stuff:

• Marshal's have a new ability Concussive Strike that unlocks at level 3; existing Marshals will need to talk to their trainer in Newhaven City to obtain it. This ability is a short daze that interrupts NPC executions. Alchemy versions turn it into a longer lasting AoE Daze with the Alchemy 2 version being unresistable.

• Warden abilities Venom Shock, Lingering Strikes, and Viperid Toxins now all scale with +Chemical Damage. The majority of the game is not currently itemized for +Chemical Damage, this is currently mainly going to impact Ibaxus where Warden ability damage has fallen behind.

• Warden's Viperid Toxins now give the Warden a small amount of threat based on damage dealt.

• Brigand ability Mark now deals physical damage and scales with the Brigand's +Damage stats. The bonus amount is an average of all your +Damage stats.

• Added new skylight shader for dungeons. You can now see clouds and stars through them!

Continued Optimization Efforts:

Now that we are on Steam our previous bandwidth limitations have eased a bit. This has allowed us to start digging into our texture compression formats and favor higher quality at the expense of higher bandwidth & disk space. Expect the next few patches to be slightly heftier in size due to these changes.

In addition, we have started make our way into the weeds when it comes to further optimizing the client. We're at a point where all of the "obvious big wins" have already been taken care of and all that is left is the little things. For the next few patches expect continued incremental improvements that while are not much on their own, hopefully will add up to significant gains.

• Disabled some HDRP features that were eating up VRAM but were not used in the game.

• Adjusted texture settings used for the skydome to free up VRAM.

• Adjusted import settings and sizes on a number of UI element textures. (ongoing)

• Adjusted a number of UI image atlases to further reduce draw calls. (ongoing)

• Adjusted import settings on a number of meshes throughout the game. (ongoing)

• Adjusted compression and memory state settings on a number of audio files. (ongoing)

• Humanoids

  • Currently, all Humanoid textures (skin/hair/equipment/etc) have been updated to higher quality texture compression. It will take some time, but we will eventually extend this to all other textures in the game.

  • Shaders for Eyes and Skin have been rewritten and optimized.

  • Reduced max resolution of mask textures.

  • Capped max resolution of hair material.

  • Implemented a render texture caching system that allows humanoid characters to "share" textures for skin and hair.

To properly implement the texture caching system mentioned above we unfortunately had to remove the muscle slider from character creation. In our test case (Newhaven City) the above measures saved upwards of 600MB of VRAM. On the surface this may not seem like much, but for lower end cards with limited resources this could make a huge difference.