Missive XII - The Expedition Map + Development Update

Beyond the relative safety of the Chateau, the world still turns - albeit just barely. Through Reynauld’s map, you may step beyond its walls and take part in an Expedition: a journey into the mainland’s scattered ruins in search of what the old world left behind.

Choosing Your Next Journey

The Expedition Map is your gateway to the world beyond the Château.

Through Reynauld's map, you will choose where your next journey begins, gather your party, and set out into the mainland in search of equipment, resources, and whatever else still survives beyond the walls.

Whether you venture alone or alongside one or two companions, every Expedition begins here.

Setting Out

Only the party leader can choose an Expedition and commit the group to a destination. Once selected, matchmaking begins quietly in the background, allowing everyone to continue preparing while Reynauld searches for a suitable route.

You are free to explore the Château, visit vendors, organise your stash, craft equipment, or speak with its inhabitants while you wait.

Once a match has been found, a ten-second countdown begins. When the timer reaches zero, there is no turning back - your party departs together.

A Changing World

No two journeys are quite the same.

Every Expedition takes place under its own conditions. One may begin beneath a clear morning sky, while another unfolds through heavy rain, dense fog, or the darkness of night.

At launch, the Expedition rotation will primarily be used to vary these environmental conditions, giving familiar locations a fresh feel each time they return.

As Hunger grows, so too will the role of the Expedition Map. Rather than leaving every location permanently available, destinations will rotate over time. This allows us to keep matchmaking healthy while ensuring each Expedition feels active and worthwhile. It also gives us opportunities to introduce changing faction occupations, roaming mini-bosses, world modifiers, seasonal events, and other surprises that make the mainland feel alive and constantly evolving.

The world beyond the Château is never truly the same from one day to the next.

Rotating Expeditions

Available Expeditions rotate across three different durations:

• 12-hour routes

• 3-hour routes

• 1-hour routes

These rotations refresh together on the hour, creating a constantly changing selection of journeys. Some destinations remain open throughout the day, while others appear only briefly before disappearing once more.

Beyond Expeditions

The Expedition Map is more than a place to launch standard Expeditions.

As you progress through Hunger and new systems become available, this is where additional experiences will begin to appear. Boss encounters, Trials, PvE activities, seasonal events, and future game modes will all find their place here, making the Expedition Map the central hub for exploring everything the World After the End has to offer.

Development Update

Over the past few weeks we've been focused on one goal above all else: refining the core experience. This update contains a broad pass across combat, progression, movement, performance, stability and the overall player experience. While many of these changes are iterative rather than flashy, together they represent one of the largest rounds of refinement we've made to the game.

Combat & Progression

Combat has received significant attention. We've undertaken a full rebalance of character abilities and restructured the mastery system by splitting the former Martial tree into two distinct paths. Martial now focuses on ranged combat, while the new Arms tree is dedicated entirely to melee progression, allowing both playstyles to develop more naturally.

Early melee progression has also been smoothed out by removing a number of progression bottlenecks that made the first hours of melee combat feel unnecessarily restrictive. Alongside this, we've continued to rebalance melee weapons, heavy attacks and Hunger health values to create a combat sandbox where ranged and melee playstyles coexist more naturally.

We've also introduced a new Parry mechanic, rewarding well-timed defensive play and giving skilled players another layer of mastery during close-quarters combat.

Finally, lunges have been completely reworked. Lunges no longer inherit momentum from dodging or jumping, resulting in a much more predictable, readable and consistent movement mechanic.

Movement

Movement has undergone another tuning pass. Base movement speed has been increased slightly to make traversal feel a little more responsive, while still preserving the deliberate pace that defines Hunger's combat.

At the same time, heavier armour now carries a modest movement penalty, creating a more meaningful trade-off between mobility and protection. We've also introduced diminishing returns to movement speed beyond a certain point, reducing the gap between the slowest and fastest builds while still allowing players to specialise into highly mobile characters through gear and masteries.

Economy

We've revisited the vendor economy following feedback from previous playtests.

Vendor profit margins have been reduced significantly, making NPC merchants a much more practical option throughout progression. Vendors continue to provide a natural price floor and ceiling for the economy, but should now feel like useful merchants rather than emergency suppliers.

Château

Area Two of the Château - The Cauldron - has received a substantial polish pass.

We've continued preparing the area for Hector's upcoming Masterwork questline while improving the environment itself through visual polish, gameplay improvements and general refinement.

Performance & Graphics

Performance continues to be a major area of investment.

This update includes numerous optimisations across the game, reducing hitches and improving overall frame consistency.

We've also added support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), providing AMD users with an additional upscaling option.

For players using SSGI, we've integrated CACAO ambient occlusion to address the shimmering artifacts that many players reported, resulting in a noticeably cleaner image while retaining the benefits of screen-space global illumination.

Extraction & Quality of Life

We've continued refining the extraction experience.

Extraction balloon smoke is now visible from a greater distance, while the red smoke indicating a contested extraction will now only appear when multiple parties are present. This should provide clearer information without unnecessarily revealing player activity.

We've also added protected item support for specific items such as Maps, preventing them from being accidentally taken into an expedition and lost.

Stability & Multiplayer

A tremendous amount of work has gone into overall stability.

In the weeks since Tech Test 3, we have already fixed 100s of bugs, alongside a large number of crash fixes and general gameplay improvements across virtually every area of the game.

We've also spent considerable time improving matchmaking, resolving many of the reliability issues and edge cases encountered during previous playtests to create a more stable online experience. This work is continuing to be our major focus as we prepare to provide the best possible experience in our upcoming Open Beta.

Audio

Audio occlusion has been improved, fixing an issue where footsteps and other positional sounds could become incorrectly muffled when originating from behind the player. Positional audio should now be considerably more reliable during exploration and combat.

This is only part of what we've been working on. Please do not assume that it is complete, or that if a feature/bug/request has not been listed then it will not receive attention. We'll have more to share as we get closer to the next playtest - especially when it comes to further refinements based on your feedback. As always, thank you to everyone who continues to play, report issues and help shape Hunger.

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