A Touch of Vanity

This update introduces Vanity Pets and a full Cosmetic Equipment Layer, expanding customization options alongside a number of fixes, improvements, and optimizations.

As we close out 2025, we want to sincerely thank our players for their continued support and enthusiasm throughout the year. We are grateful to be building this experience alongside such a wonderful community and are excited to share these new features with you. We wish you a happy and safe holiday season and look forward to creating even more content for you in 2026!

At the bottom of these patch notes, you will find a look back at many of our accomplishments from the past year.

Updates

• Makeup is now rendered on top of face paint for female characters.

• If you have a text filter field active and hit escape, it will now be cleared & deselected rather than closing the window (Auction House & Merchant).

• Increased the border size of upper right icons to reduce rendering artifacts.

• Reduced size of upper right icons slightly.

• Reduced emission levels of Snare VFX.

• Added a number of color variants for NPC avatars.

(Makeup rendering over face paint and complexion)

Fixes

• Fixed some lingering issues with equipment layer visuals.

• Fixed issues with complexion, paint, and makeup for darker skin tones.

• Fixed Spelling on Vicious Bite.

• Fixed a number of spelling mistakes in lore documents and quests.

• Fixed issues with missing rock collisions.

• Fixed Shifting Strike Alchemy 2 to properly give effect to group.

• Fixed various effects not properly triggering Night Watch. There remains some cases where Night Watch doesn't properly trigger such as against Damage Shields and we will be looking at reworking Night Watch to make it more consistent in all combat scenarios.

• Fixed gathering nodes being embedded in rocks. Some resource nodes may no longer make contact with the ground - if that happens please report your position so we can investigate!

• Fixed missing avatars for some NPCs.

• Fixed two level up messages showing in chat on level up.

• Fixed stuck spots in Newhaven Valley, Newhaven City, Northreach, Meadowlands, Dryfoot, Dryfoot Stronghold, Redshore, Redshore Ridge, Grimstone Canyon, Grizzled Peaks, and Ibaxus.

Optimizations

• Further reduced the number of textures loaded into memory at any given time for humanoid characters. This should free additional VRAM. Note that the "Humanoid Textures" setting will now only impact gear worn by humanoids; it will have no impact on skin texture resolution.

• Shadow culling now occurs relative to the camera. This improves shadow stability when far from the world origin.

• Set Eye of Ibax's light source to static shadow casting. This should reduce some CPU overhead when the sun is below the horizon.

• Reduced the max shadow distance from 300 to 200 meters. This reduces the overall CPU overhead of shadow rendering and improves distant shadow quality.

• Reduced the number of shadow cascades at high qualities from 4 -> 3 to reduce CPU overhead.

• Reconfigured shadow settings for the different quality settings to be more consistent with one another. Adjusting your quality setting will also adjust your shadow qualities.

• NPCs will now disable their animators when beyond 30m when you have no line of sight. In regions like Freehold these were causing significant CPU usage due to the complexity of humanoid animators when compared with non-humanoids. There are still performance problems in this region we are investigating, but this should help.

• Corrected some building components to be marked as static shadow casters.

Note that with the above shadow changes differences in regions with & without shadow may become much more apparent. We are actively looking into ways to reduce this visual discontinuity and improve things in general. In other words: expect more tweaks in the coming patches.

Vanity Pets

Vanity Pets are charming companions that follow you on your adventures throughout the world. Currently, ten pets can be purchased from various merchants, with an additional thirty available as drops, and more will be added in future updates. When danger arises, your pet will step aside and vanish until you summon it again. Subscribers are able to use pet emotes and enjoy shorter summon times when interacting with their companions.

The Vanity Pet UI can be accessed via the button in the upper right control panel or via the default keybind (P).

Within this UI a pet can be selected, summoned, or dismissed. Summoning your pet takes 5s for subscribers and 10s for non-subscribers. To swap to a different pet, simply hit the select button on your desired pet. There are three chat commands that can be used in chat window or macro bar:

• Summon your selected pet:

  • /pet summon

  • /ps

• Dismiss your active pet:

  • /pet dismiss

  • /pd

• Emote (subscribers only). The available options are listed on the pet's tooltip and varies by pet. (Note that these emotes will play for all remote clients as well):

  • /pet emote

  • /pe

A few additional notes:

• Your pet has a right click context menu with options for dismiss & individual emotes.

• Other's pets have tooltips that display the pet's name.

• If your pet gets too far from you it will teleport to your side.

• Pets cannot be damaged or targeted.

• On entering combat pets are automatically dismissed.

• Remote players will see your pet, but may not agree on their exact position due to the way we are synchronizing data across the network.

• Remote players will see your pet disappear when you are beyond a certain distance from them. They will automatically re-appear for those players when you get closer.

• Pets have nameplates! Two toggles have also been added to the interface options:

  • Show Pet Names for Your Pet

  • Show Pet Names for Other's Pets

• Current availability:

  • 1 from Marta in Newhaven City for event currency (this purchase will grant the pet to all of your characters)

  • 10 from various merchants throughout the world

  • 30 from various mobs as drops

• Dropped pets are not dropped from bosses.

• Dropped pets are tradable and can be placed on the Auction House.

• A new category has been added to the Auction House's dropdown filter for pets.

We fully expect the dropped vanity pets take a while to both discover and acquire.

Cosmetic Equipment Layer (Subscribers only)

We have heard your cries and now bestow the gift of a full cosmetic layer! This new layer is available to all active subscribers.

For non-subscribers, the layer will not be visible on your character and items cannot be placed into these slots; however, any existing items may still be removed (similar to the previous cosmetic slot).

Like other adornment layers, these visuals can be toggled on or off all at once by right-clicking the Cosmetic tab and selecting the appropriate option.

Visual priority of items is determined by the reverse order of layers: Cosmetic -> Ibaxian -> Base

In addition, we have added a new collection of equipment to the event merchant in Newhaven City (Marta). "Valtane's Vain Collection" is a collection of Valtane's favorite pieces, all of which have visuals which match Valtane's Vanity... in that they remove the visuals! These new pieces are ideal for slotting into your cosmetic layer to remove the visuals of that slot. All visible slots except for pants & shirt are available. Note that Valtane's Vanity still comes from the original source and is not replaced by any items on Marta.

Note that the old cosmetic slot has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update.

A Look Back at 2025

As 2025 comes to a close let's take a look back at some of what we've accomplished:

• Content:

  • New world boss in Dryfoot

  • Crafting V2

  • New VFX:

    • NPC execution

    • Player teleport

    • Others' disappear

  • Ibaxus

  • Essence Wells + Ember Vein Adornments

  • New Player Experience Revamp

    • Ember Stone + Alchemy can be earned at level 1

    • Pick a class right from the get go with more unique starting skills.

    • Minor revamp to Newhaven Valley.

  • XP Curve Adjustments

  • GEL improvements

  • Vanity Pets

  • Cosmetic Equipment Layer

• UI:

  • Auction House

  • Separated Alchemy I and II cooldowns

  • Compass

  • Macro Bar

  • Resource node overhead nameplates

  • Revamped player stat panel

  • Loading screen improvements

  • Resizable map window

• Tech:

  • STEAM launch

  • Unity 6 upgrade

  • Support for various upscalers (STP, DLSS, FSR)

  • Follow Command

  • Optimizations

    • IL2CPP

    • UI Performance improvements

    • Application startup improvements

    • Terrain rendering optimizations

    • RAM & VRAM utilization reductions

    • Shadow optimizations