Patch Notes: 2.0.0-beta.1776 (Live)

Another big weekly live patch today, but I am very excited to report that the focus has been shifting away from Bugs (there are fewer now, yay!) and towards QoL and Feature updates. So! Rather than seeing 200 small changes, you'll start seeing 10 big changes.

This week, the headline is the opt-in Composition & Risk ruleset — a ground-up rework of how party power, growth, and guild morale fit together — landing alongside Part 1 of a multi-patch Class & Synergy overhaul. Around them: a new Material Trade Policy system, gatherers that finally level up properly, one-click party optimization, and a long run of quality-of-life, balance, and bug-fix work. More Class & Synergy updates are coming over the next week or two (teaser: each class is getting rolled abilities from a pool of 3 passives and 5 actives rather than the same 1 active and 1 passive. I'm shooting for next week for this update).

The Composition & Risk Ruleset (opt-in beta upgrade)

A reworked composition-and-risk model is now the default for new games; existing saves can opt in from Settings → Rebalance Ruleset. It reshapes party power, growth, and guild morale, described below. Heads-up: enabling it on an existing save will shift your current parties' effective OVR.

• Composition is king — Party power now runs on a two-pool model. Chemistry contributes a flat, stat-independent bonus that compresses the gap between weak and elite parties, while synergies, captain, morale, traits and the rest scale with your base. Toxic or discordant chemistry suppresses your positive bonuses — a roster of stars that won't coordinate underperforms.

• Risk pays — Win a fight that was genuinely dangerous for your party — a quest, a deep tower floor, or a lethal raid above your weight — and the survivors earn bonus stat growth scaled to the risk. Near-ceiling veterans can even shatter their potential limit (up to twice), raising their ceiling, complete with a Limit Break celebration.

• Bad apples spoil the guild bunch — A new guild-cohesion measure tracks your roster's morale and bad-apple problems; low cohesion makes troublemakers' morale drain compound, with a Commander warning when cohesion frays.

• Ego clashes and jealousy — A large skill gap between two adventurers can breed resentment on a shared quest or raid — or, if both are loyal and trusting, the star takes the lesser under their wing as a mentor instead.

• Earlier, recurring rivalries — Nemesis guilds can now emerge from guild tier 4 (instead of only at tier 7), and a fresh rivalry begins after a previous one resolves.

• Toxic parties can lose members — A party left in sustained toxic chemistry builds social volatility, with two escalating Commander warnings before its unhappiest member walks out of the guild entirely. Volatility decays once chemistry recovers, so you can always pull a party back from the brink — and a new Social Volatility difficulty slider tunes how fast it builds.

Class & Synergy Update — Part 1

The first pass of an ongoing upgrade to Classes, Synergies, and Abilities. This one rounds out damage-type coverage, gives every damage dealer a synergy that rewards its element, and makes rarer heroes genuinely more valuable to build around.

Four new party synergies

• Astral Sight — Oracle · Chronomancer · Geomancer · Totem Shaman → +4% / +7% result floor (more consistent outcomes; softens bad luck).

• Apex Predators — Northern Ranger · Beast Master · Hexblade · Dragoon · Blood Knight → +4% / +6% critical success chance.

• Living Legends — Oath Paladin · Drunken Monk · Berserker · Aegis Warden · Hexblade → +4% / +7% party morale.

• Verdant Wardens — Stone Druid · Warden · Tide Shaman · Beast Master · Harmony Druid → +4% / +7% injury reduction.

Damage-type coverage fixes

Some classes had no synergy that actually rewarded the damage they deal.

• Frost Mage now wields Ice and Arcane — opening up Ice+Arcane parties for the first time, and tapping the Arcane synergies its frost magic always should have.

• Rogue & Assassin finally count toward Shadow Cabal — the iconic shadow killers now benefit from a Shadow-damage synergy.

• Totem Shaman now routes into Arcane Mastery (alongside Geomancer).

• Ranger now joins Spirit Bond for a proper Nature-damage route.

• Arcane Mage now contributes to the pure-Arcane Arcane Mastery synergy, matching every other dedicated caster's pure-type route.

Rarity rebalance — your rare heroes pull more weight

Previously every class had roughly the same number of synergies regardless of rarity, so a couple of common staples dominated team-building. Now the rarer the class, the more synergies it tends to anchor.

• Commons trimmed slightly — Knight steps out of a healing synergy and Warrior out of a morale synergy. They're still strong, just no longer the densest nodes on the board.

• Rare, Ultra-Rare and Legendary classes gain more routes — via the new synergies above plus expanded membership for Berserker, Geomancer, Oracle, Chronomancer, Arch Priest, Summoner, Holy Knight, Balance Monk, Bard, and the legendary Aegis Warden.

• Net effect — building around a marquee hero like Hexblade, Northern Ranger, Oath Paladin or Aegis Warden now opens up noticeably more synergy potential. No class was left behind — every hero still has multiple viable synergy routes.

Synergy fixes

• Prophetic Freeze (Frost Mage + Oracle → +7% result floor) now displays its proper translated name everywhere instead of a placeholder in some languages.

• All synergy names and descriptions are now fully localized across every supported language.

More New Features

• Material Trade Policy panel — A new panel in Markets → Trade Filters lets you set a per-material policy for the whole warehouse: Block a material so rivals never request it, or set a Floor ("keep ≥ N") so rivals only ask for the surplus above what you want to hold. An Export Outlook header shows rival export interest, projected export gold value, and how many materials are blocked or floored. Browse all 76 materials (owned or not, so you can pre-configure) with tier tabs, smart filters, search, and bulk "keep ≥ 100 / 250 / 500" presets.

• Gatherers now grow with experience — Hired Gatherers earn XP each week from their hauls and level up, raising their skill toward their potential ceiling, which directly increases their yield over time. Their level now shows on the Staff panel.

• One-click Party Optimization swaps — The Commander → Personnel optimizer's chemistry-driven swap suggestions are now clickable. Click a suggestion (or focus it and press Enter) and the swap is performed for you, including the cross-party trades you used to have to set up by hand.

Quality of Life

• Quest Board — Gold/Wk — A new Gold/Wk sort and a Gold Efficiency Commander auto-deploy focus rank contracts by gold earned per occupied week (job length plus rest) rather than raw payout.

• Two new difficulty sliders — "Training Speed" and "Ceiling Slowdown" let you tune how fast stats grow from training and how sharply training tapers near a stat's potential ceiling.

• Tower Reclamation Status clarity — Front-line floor, resonance bar, and weeks until your cleared floors are retaken now sit at the top of the Scout Intelligence column, so your tower-reset timer is visible at a glance instead of buried at the bottom.

• Patron quests are easy to spot — Patron contracts now carry a clear "PATRON 2×" badge on quest cards and in the quest details, and your division's patron faction is shown in the compact Crown Cup League standings.

• Full level-up stat list — The level-up entry in an adventurer's Recent Activity now lists every stat that increased, instead of cutting off after the first four.

• Rename parties on the road — You can now rename a party while it's out on a quest, raid, or contract — a name is purely cosmetic, so it's no longer locked during deployment. The composition controls stay locked until the party returns.

• Teaching talents show real numbers — Every Academy talent now surfaces the concrete effect it produces (stat growth per week, graduation bonuses, event chances, and more), and "Efficient Methods" is re-labeled to describe what it actually does — boosting the dormitory's trainee training (faster stat growth) — instead of a morale bonus that was never shown.

• Operations dashboard reads like a checklist — Each Academy row shows the trainee's semester week and flags a ⚠ when a mid-semester Intervention is available; clicking an Academy row jumps straight to the Prospects (Youth) tab; and a new Markets line shows your remaining weekly Guild Trades.

• RemovedClearer party-notes field — Empty party-notes are easier to spot as editablethe placeholder prompt and expand chevron now read as an interactive control rather than a disabled field.

• Runesmith accessories in Sage's Wisdom — A new entry explains the Runesmith's craftable Runestones and Glyphs as wearable Accessory items — their tiers, stat leans, crafting, and how they differ from rune inscriptions.

• Black Market Contacts clarified — The perk description now makes clear the 2× sell bonus on Rare+ gear is automatic, with no toggle.

• More of the game translated — Zodiac sign names, season labels, damage-type names, personality descriptors, adventurer stat names, Recruitment Office and scout-status labels, performance-report roles, movement-log entries, the commander's brief, and Live Feed timestamps now display in your chosen language.

• Chemistry tab disambiguated — The Registry's Chemistry tab label now reads clearly as "party chemistry" (not the school subject) in several languages.

Balance

• Training no longer hits a wall — The flat-rate-then-hard-stop training curve is replaced with diminishing returns near a stat's potential ceiling: reaching roughly 85% of a ceiling stays at today's pace, but pushing a stat to its absolute max is now a long-term grind — always reachable, never fully stalled.

• Academy graduates rebalanced — B is now the reliable academy output; A/S potential requires deep, sustained investment. Potential fluctuation alone can no longer move more than one tier from a prospect's raw potential, and the cheap focus-stacking that manufactured A/S grads has been closed.

• Role-fit matters more on quests — The old flat ±5% stat-affinity bonus is now continuous: a true specialist who brings the right stats for a quest can earn up to +12%, while a mismatched party is penalized up to −10%.

• Tower Limit Breaks are rarer and more meaningful — Instead of rolling for every surviving raider on every floor (which forged a break nearly every floor and made A→S upgrades common), the tower now forges at most one Limit Break per floor, with the chance scaled by tier — lower tiers break readily while an A→S forge is deliberately extremely rare. Quest and raid Limit Breaks are unchanged.

• Alpha Trophies now grant XP — Harvesting an Alpha Trophy on a combat quest awards XP to every squad member, and a Trapper who brings one down gets bonus gathering XP. To keep them scarce, Alpha Trophy drop rates were trimmed about 25% on both the quest-loot and Trapper paths.

• Tactical Instructor specialist credit — A Tactical Instructor now gets the specialist treatment (the +25% stat/XP bonus and Specialist badge) on the Advanced Tactics program, which was previously only credited to Combat Instructors despite being a tactics program.

• Shared ambitions stop clashing — Two adventurers who share an ambition no longer suffer the "Competing ambitions" chemistry penalty once either of them has completed it; finished ambitions now turn into mutual respect, inspiration, or aligned drive as intended.

Bug Fixes

• Trade counter-offer exploit closed — Countering a pending offer no longer leaves the original offer's Accept button live, so you can't bank two deals (one slot-free) against a single guild. You can no longer accept an offer while you're countering it.

• Force-retired survivors show in the debrief — When a party wipes but some members are retired into staff roles instead of killed, they now appear in a "Retired to Staff" section instead of silently vanishing from the result screen.

• Academy teaching talents now work — Well-Rounded, Iron Fundamentals, Battle Instinct, Inner Fire and Fleet Footwork previously gave no benefit; their small per-week stat bonuses now accumulate across the semester instead of being lost to weekly rounding.

• Watch-mode scouts re-evaluate targets — Scouts no longer get stuck on lower-priority targets (like scouting rival guilds while ignoring newly-available academy prospects); they now switch to a higher-priority target when one becomes available, without a manual restart.

• Retired adventurers keep their real social stats — Converting an adventurer to a staff role no longer inflates Leadership, Charisma, Teamwork and the rest toward the role's ceiling; they carry over unchanged.

• Blocked materials are respected — The "not for trade" / blocked-material list now actually works — rivals no longer keep requesting materials you've blocked.

• Tower fights build chemistry — Fighting together in the tower now counts toward "quests together" and refreshes shared history, just like quests and raids, so chemistry no longer decays during long tower campaigns.

• Gatherer & Scout XP bars — They previously overshot the bar and showed a negative "XP to next level"; they now show progress into the current level against that level's cost, matching other staff.

• "N recipes ready" badge accuracy — For crafters assigned to construction projects, the badge no longer counts equipment recipes they're blocked from making — it now reflects only the work they can actually do.

• Desktop/Steam save reliability — Several save-data-loss issues fixed: a save that failed to write to disk no longer falsely reports success, anti-reversion protection now works on compressed saves so progress can't silently regress, and a durable fallback save is written before the disk write so a failed save surfaces a real warning instead of being swallowed.

• Crown Cup division names — Standings now match the guide: the Merchants, Temple, Military, and Nobles Divisions (the inconsistent "Consortium" and "Holy" labels are gone).

• Nemesis strategy tips corrected — The tips now make plain that only completing the Diplomatic Summit quest clears the Council's Tier 7 certification condition (out-earning, counter-poaching, and Celestial Ward are competitive or defensive only), the alliance tip is correctly noted as a Tier 9 unlock, and the Celestial Ward is sourced from the Temple vendor.

• Localization fixes — The first-raid warning header now shows a proper ⚠️ icon instead of literal entity text, the Russian spelling of Гаргадуза is normalized across all text per the translation community's agreed convention, and a Russian astrologer line was corrected.