Surprise Monday Live Patch: 2.0.0-beta.1831 (Live)

I had a very productive weekend and I just couldn't wait until Wednesday to push these updates ;)

Long story short, I wanted the improved UI/UX for Ambitions Live asap since the first pass was not clear (my apologies), so a sneaky Monday Live patch is upon us. It's a big drop: new apex classes and a further refined evolution system, a rebuilt quest board, a redesigned Adventurer Dossier, a deep pass on Multiplayer, and a long tail of polish and fixes.

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Heroes & Evolution

Four new apex classes join the roster:

• Dryad — an ultra-rare grove-healer who shields the whole party in living bark, roots enemies, and pours out party-wide healing.

• Mistwalker — an ultra-rare melee assassin who blinks through fog with high evasion and guaranteed crits, stunning and blinding from the mist.

• Embersworn — a fire-wreathed tank who ignites every enemy with burning damage-over-time while soaking blows up front.

• Levinguard — a storm-forged lightning tank who hammers all foes with thunderclaps and chained bolts.

Every base class now has a destiny beyond its starting Drive. Each walks a single same-role evolution apex, and classes that can't evolve follow titled Legend paths instead — so no hero is left without a potential brighter future (if they are willing to work for it).

Each Legend path grants a small permanent passive the hero radiates whenever deployed — the Slayer sharpens party damage, the Mentor speeds party XP, the Guardian softens the party's wounds, the Broker draws richer quest gold — and a party of Legends stacks them.

Knights and Warriors fork down elemental roads. Knights can evolve into the Frostguard (the frozen ward) or the shared Embersworn (the burning bulwark) — but the road only opens after the hero personally fells an elemental raid boss, and which element you broke decides which evolution the Crossroads offers. Warriors get their own fork: the Embersworn or the new Levinguard (lightning) — the Calling "The Gathering Charge" opens after completing 12 quests in a row with no party death, and "The Thunderhead" ascension follows after 18 quests in a row without injury.

Raid bosses now wear elemental epithets. Roughly half arrive bearing a marker — Frostbound, Emberforged, Stormcalled, Venomplagued, or Shadowclad — and downing a Frost or Fire one credits every hero in the party toward the Knight's elemental evolution.

The Adventurer Dossier

The Adventurer Dossier has been fully redesigned with a richer "Guild Dossier" presentation across every tab. It is now fancy AF.

• A new Ambition tab lays out each hero's full journey — Drive, Crossroads, Calling, Ascension, and the Proving — with live progress, a plain-language "your next step," side-by-side comparisons of the roads on offer, and a button that jumps straight to the right quest.

• A new Chemistry tab gathers status, personality, behavior, bonds, and companions in one place, with bonds shown as a clickable portrait constellation.

• Equipment now appears directly on the Profile tab.

Combat

Lightning is now a full-fledged damage element with its own strengths and weaknesses — Mercenaries, Harpy Flocks, and Dragons are vulnerable to it while Giants and Ancient Golems shrug it off, it clashes with Nature in roster chemistry, and the Stormcaller now wields it while the Lancer adds it to its strikes.

Quests

• The great text rewrite is getting there!

• The quest board has been rewritten as a stack of illuminated frontier writs — every card and its full detail panel now read like a posted contract.

• Every quest type now opens with its own rewritten authored briefing, grounded in the official region named on the card.

• Crown contracts, alliance jobs, and raid postings have been rewritten, with twenty fresh subtitles and reworked rumors that quietly hint at the deeper history beneath Hiltcrest.

• A new low-combat Frontier Work quest category covers the civilian jobs that keep a town alive — mending storm-struck holdings, relief drives, reopening shut-down workings, and a healer's rounds through sickness — paying in goodwill as much as gold.

• Festering contracts now appear on roughly one in five breach-flavored postings: left unanswered they grow harder and richer each week, climbing +3 required power and +10% reward for up to five weeks.

Wiki

The online zodiac wiki page gains a Sign Compatibility tool — pick a sun sign and see every other sign ranked best to worst.

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Ambitions

• Every zodiac Drive has been updated sign by sign to be harder and more distinctive. Instead of nearly every Drive asking for more quests or a flat power number, Drives now span raids, Tower floors, faction dispatches, captaining and commanding, morale streaks, forged bonds, league placement, equipped gear quality, and long-term contracts — with no two Drives in a sign duplicating each other.

• Each sign gains a fifth possible Drive that pulls a hero toward the deeper game — holding a garrison, climbing the Tower, completing dispatches, courting a faction, leading in the league, or standing beside others at their Proving — so a hero's starting ambition varies more from recruit to recruit.

• Gold-earning ambitions now credit gold from raids and the Tower, not just quests, so those deeds progress at a fair pace. Progress already made is preserved.

• The serious-injury recovery ambition now counts recovery from major or critical wounds — previously it required an injury so rare that competent players almost never qualified.

Classes & Combat

• Class rarity now confers inherent power — every step up in rarity adds +5 to all stats (and so +5 OVR), making a rarer class fundamentally stronger at the same potential. This applies to recruits, rival adventurers, and evolved heroes alike.

• WE HAVE TAUNT, MY DUDES! Tanks now draw the enemy's attention in the Tower — roughly 70% of a boss's blows land on a standing tank instead of your squishier heroes, and the Knight's Taunt hard-locks the boss onto the taunter.

• Several classes have been retiered to better match their power: the Berserker is now rare (down from ultra-rare); the Holy Knight, Enchanter, and Stone Druid are now uncommon; and the Drunken Monk and Spellblade are now rare — so they turn up more often when scouting.

Trade & Economy

• Lopsided trades no longer count as "fair" for renown — the fair-trade window has been tightened, curbing renown farming through one-sided deals.

• Grimoires now stack up to 15, up from 10.

• Custom difficulty can now push the market trade-price spread up to 3× (was 2×) for a harsher economy.

Multiplayer

• The shared free-agent and staff pool now scales with the number of human players (for real this time), so larger leagues no longer drain crafters, gatherers, and other support staff to nothing.

• Strong rival guilds (Tier 6+) now climb the Tower over a season — they get a dedicated tower-run budget instead of being crowded out by quests and stalling at low floors.

• Rival guilds now gain renown on merit rather than being rubber-banded toward the middle, so leading rivals can pull ahead and trailing ones stay competitive instead of the league compressing to mid-tier.

• Rival renown now scales with the league's chosen difficulty exactly like yours, so AI guilds keep pace on every difficulty.

• League divisions now re-shuffle every season, matching single-player — your division genuinely changes year over year, announced by the Crown Herald.

• The cap on submitted renown now scales with how many weeks you were away, so catching up after time offline no longer clips your legitimately earned renown down to a single week's worth.

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Quest Board

• Hero- and party-specific contracts — The Proving, Set Completion, and Party of Heroes — are now pinned to the top of the board, above any active filters, so a hero's once-per-journey trial can't hide behind your filter settings. A banner explains them: each must be run by its specific hero or party, and the commander won't auto-deploy them.

• Each quest card now carries its issuing faction's accent color throughout — type and faction read at a glance.

• Selecting a quest marks it with a rising-ember effect plus a faction-accent border, brighter ring, and colored glow; hovering any quest, contract, or raid card previews that card's type color.

• Tactical guidance from your tacticians and contacts is now larger, higher-contrast, and rendered in the plain UI font instead of small italic serif — easier to read everywhere it appears, including the Damage Type panel.

• When several heroes are ready to ascend at once, the board shows a notice naming who is still awaiting their Proving, since only one trial posts each week.

Dossier & Ambitions

• The Dossier now spells out whether a hero will change class (Evolution) or earn a titled destiny (Legend), and even classes that can't evolve get a look-ahead at the Legend paths they're closest to.

• At the Crossroads, the Legend road whose deed echoes the hero's completed Drive sorts to the top and wears an "Echoes their Drive" badge, and the panel opens with a callback to the Drive that carried them there.

• Heroes can now Reconsider this Calling — step back to the Crossroads and choose a different path, keeping any signature already earned.

• Heroes waiting at the Crossroads are flagged on the Registry tab (with a ✦ count), on roster rows, and on the adventurer card — with a "Choose a Calling" shortcut that opens straight to the Ambition tab, where each road's requirements are shown before you commit.

• The ambition journey spine got a polish pass: the current step pulses with a glowing ring and orbiting sparkles, step nodes lift on hover, and tooltips snap in cleanly.

Training & Academy

• A new Auto-train idle button enrolls every idle adventurer in weakness-based training and assigns each a free instructor in a single click — and it no longer wastes training on stats that are already maxed.

• The Training panel now highlights each adventurer's main stats, with more program variety to choose from.

• Party training now shows the full bonus breakdown in Expected Results: intensity's effect on XP and chemistry, plus the instructor's stat and XP bonuses with the specialization marker.

• Party training gains a "Disable Auto" button — the current session finishes but won't auto-repeat, matching individual training.

Trade & Markets

• Trade screens now show an at-a-glance Now% signal — how a material's current price compares to its baseline — inline rather than only in the tooltip.

• Incoming trade and poaching offers now spell out what you receive versus what you give up.

• Incoming material trade letters now show their deal-quality rating (Excellent Offer, Preferred Partner, Fair Trade, Underpaying, Bad Deal) right in the inbox list, so you can triage offers without opening each one.

• Every new guild now begins with a founding Treasurer already on the books. Their auto-trade desk stays off until you choose to enable it.

• Your Treasurer now cancels still-pending material offers it can no longer fulfill after auto-accepting trades, instead of leaving dead requests in the inbox.

Gear & Crafting

• The Select Adventurers list in the Armory can now be sorted by OVR, role, or party, and each adventurer shows clickable primary-stat chips that filter gear to items improving that stat.

• Salvage and refine views now display the stat bonuses each piece of gear grants.

• Refinement recipes now show output value, input cost, and net value added.

• Crafters assigned to a construction crew now show a 🏗️ indicator in the Crafting panel and are no longer counted as idle.

• Inventory and vault capacity are roomier at every Armory tier — inventory is now 50 / 100 / 175 / 250 (up from 30 / 60 / 100 / 150) and the protected vault is now 100 / 200 / 350 / 500 (up from 60 / 120 / 200 / 300).

• A new "Vault unequipped" button moves all your loose gear into the vault at once, highest-value first, stopping when it fills (relics are skipped).

• When your inventory is over cap, a clear warning shows how many items are over and reminds you the lowest-value excess auto-scraps next week unless you equip, vault, or sell it.

• Strip All now notes when deployed adventurers keep their gear — it stays locked while they're out on a mission.

Interface & Reports

• The rising-ember glow that marks your selection on the Quest Board now also lights the card you've opened in Parties, Gear, Crafting, and Factions, tinted to each screen's accent.

• Tower and Crown Cup battles gain a 0.5× slow-motion speed plus Pause (I am very proud of the Pause feature) and single-step controls so you can follow the action blow by blow, and the league Rival Challenge gets the full speed cluster (0.5× / 1× / 2× / instant).

• The raid Chronicle now marks fallen heroes with a red skull, distinct from the orange marker for injuries, so casualties read clearly at a glance.

• The adventurer career chart now labels its number "Base OVR" to make clear it tracks base overall, not the bonus-inclusive party figure.

Sage's Wisdom

A new Sign Compatibility reference explains how zodiac signs drive party chemistry. Employing an Astrologer unlocks the precise best- and worst-match reading for each sign.

General

• A held-down or stuck spacebar no longer races through multiple weeks — only deliberate presses advance the turn.

• New players now start on the cleaner CleanOS theme by default. Classic, Parchment, and Dossier remain available in Settings.

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Names & Portraits

• A custom name you give an adventurer is now a permanent, guild-wide rename that shows up consistently on every screen — registry, party formations, dossiers, recruit cards, battle reports, the live feed, the tactician's debrief, and year-end summaries — instead of quietly reverting to the original name on some surfaces. (This covers the Limit Break announcement, quest and battle debriefs, the battle log, achievement and injury notices, contract-renewal prompts, and academy semester screens.)

• Renames now stick through every life change: you can rename an academy trainee, and you can still re-edit or undo a custom name after a hero is retired into staff, traded to a rival, or graduated.

• Uploaded custom portraits no longer revert to procedural artwork after a hero is retired into a staff role, graduated, or otherwise transformed — your chosen portrait follows them through every transition.

Heroes, Ambitions & Evolution

• Using a Metamorphosis grimoire on a dual-class hero no longer strips the second class's role — dual-class heroes keep both roles and their slot eligibility. Heroes already broken by this are repaired automatically when their save loads.

• Heroes are no longer offered a Calling they can never finish — paths that demand an OVR beyond a hero's reach are now hidden at the Crossroads.

• Heroes whose chosen Calling was retired in an update are sent back to the Crossroads to pick a new road, keeping any signature they already earned, instead of being stuck with no ambition path.

• Ambition descriptions now clearly match their completion requirements.

• Ten single-role synergies no longer advertise a fourth tier you could never reach — a party can field at most three of one role, so these now correctly top out at their three-member bonus. The bonuses you already earn are unchanged.

Quests, Combat & Reports

• Spellcasters in tower battles are now narrated casting spells instead of firing arrows — backline mages and other arcane classes no longer "loose an arrow" while wielding a staff.

• A hero's Proving trial is now unmistakable on the board — it keeps its proper title and wears an ornate greenknot frame no routine contract shares.

• The Proving trial of Ascension no longer shows a misleading 0g reward tally — its report now plainly states that the reward is the Ascension itself and you do not receive gold, sorry!

• The Guild Commander no longer reports that all parties are running smoothly when your roster is tiny; small guilds now get scale-appropriate commentary.

• Year-end hover cards for your own adventurers no longer show "???" for OVR and stats.

• An instructor's hidden specialty stays masked in the scouting view until scouting actually reveals it.

• Losing a guild tier no longer strands adventurers in now-hidden party slots — idle members in over-capacity slots are released back to availability.

• The "Under Construction" panel now shows proper station names (like The Forge or Construction Yard) instead of raw keys, and station names are now localized throughout the game.

• Crown Cup ceremony pages (MVP, All-Tournament, and Records) now display custom adventurer portraits correctly.

Trade, Treasurer & Audio

• Treasurer market trades now appear in your trade history and treasury ledger.

• The audio toggle on the main menu now starts music on the first click after a restart, instead of needing two clicks.

Equipment

• Scrounged starter gear no longer falls apart after a mission or two — it arrives worn but sturdy and wears down gradually over many quests like any other equipment, so green recruits stop stripping naked after every job.

Town

• Removed an in-development Dwarven Forgeworks feature that had begun appearing in the live game by accident — I'm a ways off from completing that, sorry!

Linux

• Native Linux builds that failed to open on certain Wayland compositors now recover on their own: after a launch that never renders, the game falls back through XWayland and other graphics modes, writes a launch-error log, and remembers whatever fix worked — and you can force XWayland yourself from Settings.

Multiplayer

• Crown Cup League standings are now shared and identical across every guildmaster: divisions are built the moment a league is created, so the lobby shows the same brackets before the first week and every guild can see each other and track each other's annual renown. Your guild now reliably appears in the standings even in an older league whose brackets had already formed.

• Placing a sealed bid on a free agent or staff member no longer flashes a premature "signed" celebration — the modal reads "Sealed Bid Ready" and waits for the league to resolve the contest before anyone is hired.

• Headhunted recruits you paid a scout to find no longer vanish before you can sign them — these private finds now hire instantly instead of being thrown into a league-wide bid that always failed.

• Accepting a series of countered trade offers now correctly counts against your weekly trade-caravan limit, closing an exploit that let you exceed your Trade Routes capacity.

• Renaming your guild now propagates to every other player, showing your new name in their standings and rosters.

• Rival recent-activity feeds, year-end review standings, and the leaderboards now match across every guildmaster, drawn from the shared league ledger instead of a private, divergent copy.

• Crown Cup history is now recorded per year (so a multi-year catch-up no longer loses a season's result), wins and victory ceremonies are delivered durably even to players who were offline when the cup concluded, and the server-resolved cup opens a watchable results screen showing the four champions and your placement.

• Rival guilds propose material trades again on the Guild Trading screen, anonymized enemies now read as "Hidden Knight" rather than a bare class name, winning the Crown Cup counts toward your achievement stat, and division champions use the same tiebreaker the standings display.