MAJOR UPDATE — Deeper Kingdom: Passive Trees, 87 New Cards, Three New Node Types

DEEPER KINGDOM — MAJOR UPDATE 0.33.9

Seventy-five patches in one. Everything since Ashes Remade: a skill tree for every hero, eighty-seven new cards, three new kinds of fight, twenty-one new things living in the ash — and a bestiary that stops showing you the same wolf four times a run.

🌳 Every Hero Has a Passive Tree

The old mastery ladder handed you fixed unlocks at fixed levels. It's gone. Each hero now has an 18-node tree across three branches, opened from the hero panel.

• Mastery — unlocked by hero level. An exclusive rare, +1 Mana on turn one, −4% enemy Max HP, an exclusive legendary, and an upgrade to the hero's Pro trait.

• Conquest — unlocked by killing bosses, the last gate by killing one without a single shop or rest heal. +3 Protection on turn one, +25% Ash, +25% Essence, +1 max hand size, and relief from the hero's Con.

• Doctrine — unlocked by playing cards of your hero's own elements. +8% damage, +1 flat damage, a chance to refund the fight's first affinity card, a Resonance of 4 that also draws, and drawn affinity cards that sometimes cost 1 less.

Rows mint points, nodes spend them — so a branch is a set of choices, not a checklist. Respec is free, unlimited, and available any time you're not in a run. Every hero also owns an exclusive legendary nobody else can ever get; essence cannot buy it at any price. The level curve came down with it: hero cap is 10, and reaching it takes about five winning runs.

⚓ Anchor — One Engine, Not Four

Exhaust was two words wearing one. Every card using it was a persistent power, and the word only ever named the card leaving — never the effect staying. So the effect got its own keyword. An Anchor sinks out of the battle when played and runs until the fight ends. And there is one rule: only one anchor holds at a time. Play a second and the first one drops. Anchors compete instead of stacking, so a deck with four of them is one engine you re-choose as the fight turns.

• 40 new Anchor cards — one common and one rare written for every one of the 20 heroes, and locked to them. All cost 3, because at 3 mana a card is a whole turn: pay the turn up front, collect for the rest of the fight. Dead weight in a three-turn stomp, excellent in a boss slog.

• 17 DLC legendaries moved onto it. Steam Engine plus Molten Core plus Obsidian Heart used to be a legal stack. It isn't any more.

• A tray under your hero shows what's anchored, the Codex has an Anchor tab, and swapping announces itself three ways — because an effect ending silently reads as a bug every time.

Exhaust now means only what it says: spent, nothing lingers. Steam post image

🃏 87 New Cards

• 40 Anchor cards — above.

• 35 new Overflow cards, doubling that pack to 70. The batch exists so the reservoir heroes stop borrowing mana ramp, sustain and draw from the base game: every capability is now covered from inside the pack.

• 12 new Scorching cards — “Glasswork.” Glass had exactly one card that applied it. It has a family now: appliers, multi-hit shatterers to spend the stacks on, and the Heat payoffs the pack had been promising.

• Chain is a card effect, not just a Lightning Resonance payoff. One attack per link, damage descending, all in one turn — 4/3/2 printed right on the card. Six Lightning cards converted from flat multi-hit, so they kill more small enemies on the first link and waste less overkill.

• Every Overflow card can be upgraded. All 70 were the only non-curse cards in the game with no upgrade path, so a reservoir hero's own cards were being silently refused at rest sites and the Anvil.

Nine new keyword chips replace prose with icons: Anchor · Reflect · Chain · Swelter · Shatter · On draw · Unplayable · Level Pools · Spill Mirror.

🗺️ Three New Kinds of Fight

• Bounty 🎯 — a wanted poster you can read before you commit. One rule at all three levels: miss the clock, keep the win, lose the purse. The top tier pays a guaranteed relic. Walking away is free.

• Crucible ⚖ — two handicaps are offered from six, and wearing one is the price of entry. Less mana. A smaller opening hand. Every relic inert. A quarter of your current HP. The payout scales with what you agreed to carry, and the heaviest chain pays a legendary that ignores the Card Sanctum lock entirely. There is no bail.

• Hunt 🐾 — a quarry guarding the way deeper. Wound it past 30% of its HP and it bolts — the fight ends there and the path beyond closes for the rest of the run. It isn't asking you to be fast. It's asking you not to wound what you can't kill. It's also the one node in the game where a lingering burn is a liability: a tick can spring the escape on the enemy's own turn.

And six new treasures — burn a card out of your run for good, a spring that pays the hurt and refuses the healthy, a cache that opens every remaining fight with +2 Strength, +5 Shield and an extra card, an essence vein, an anvil where you pick the upgrade, and a caravan that opens a shop on the spot at half price. Deep treasure nodes now pay roughly double a surface one. Steam post image

👹 Twenty-One New Enemies — And No Repeats

Five normals and two elites for every DLC. None of them touch their pack's resource mechanic; every one is built around a combat axis the game did not have.

• Scorching — a jackal whose hit count escalates 1→2→3 · a warden that caps how hard any single hit can land · a thief that steals gold and swings the hoard · a herald with a death rattle that goes through Shield and Protection · an ascetic that heals off the mana you didn't spend. Elites: one that purges its own debuffs into its attack, and a furnace on a doom clock — ×6 on turn nine.

• Overflow — a raider that costs you next turn's mana · a hulk with flat thorns per card · a choker that raises a card's cost in your hand · a crab with a two-way stance, ×0.5 shut and ×1.5 open · a thrall that mirrors half of every heal you take. Elites: twins that reform at 20%, and a colossus that halves your Protection every turn.

• Day & Night — a shade that reflects one of your own stacks back · a sprite that grows with every card you play · a warden that hits ×2 if you play fewer than two cards · a moth that gets one free strike before your first turn · an acolyte that's stronger the more HP it's missing. Elites: a choir that takes 30% less from whatever element hit it last, and an effigy that mends back to 30% — twice a fight.

An enemy you have killed does not come back in the same run. Measured over 3 000 simulated runs, the chance of meeting a repeated normal went from 84% to about 3%. Repeated elites: essentially zero. Scorching's own creatures now keep to Scorching ground — they spawn on the desert, molten, glass and citadel maps, where they're common rather than occasional. Its bosses still turn up anywhere.

📖 A Bestiary That Knows Where It Lives

All 79 lore entries were rewritten, and every one now starts with a place: the muster-field grass that grew back the wrong colour, the mine gallery that came down on its crew, the drowned belfry at the channel mouth, the sun that stopped and would not set. The Codex reads as a gazetteer of a fallen kingdom instead of 79 unconnected obituaries. And 79 painted backdrops landed for them. Every bestiary tile now shows its enemy standing in the place its lore describes — and hovering an enemy mid-fight paints the same scene behind its tooltip. Enemy abilities also stopped being vague. “Drains your Aqua pool” never said 4. “Heals for part of the damage” never said 50%. Every ability tooltip now quotes the real number, from the same table the attack itself reads. Steam post image

🌊 Overflow, Rebuilt

The reservoirs were running three value curves off one pair of pools, and two of them fought each other. A pool now means exactly two things: a number your scaling cards multiply, and a countdown to the next spill.

• The hidden pool drain is gone. It was a second currency that never appeared on any card face — play order was silently zeroing your other cards.

• Spill payouts are flat, and printed. Flood pays 9 Protection, 3 heal and 12 damage; Erupt pays 5 per strike across three strikes plus 4 Burn. Hover a reservoir and it tells you exactly what it's about to do.

• Pool cap 13 → 20, with all 17 pool-reading cards re-tuned against it.

• Convergence is now a choice. Fill both reservoirs in one turn and you pick: Steam, which evades an entire enemy turn and can save you right now, or Obsidian, which pays 8 Protection plus a permanent stack that cuts every incoming attack for the rest of the fight. Against a boss the two curves cross at about five remaining enemy turns.

• Nine Aqua cards now scale damage off the reservoir, so half a pool pays half a payoff. An Aqua deck could previously not kill anything before its tank filled.

• Overflow's enemies and relics only appear for Overflow heroes now. They were showing up in runs that could not interact with them at all — an elite whose entire mechanic was stealing from a pool permanently at zero.

💪 Strength Holds

Strength no longer decays. It used to shed a stack every turn, which made every source in the game a two-turn burst and left the stat unable to carry a build.

It now behaves like Protection

granted once, kept for the fight. Weak still decays — that asymmetry is the point. Everything downstream got quietly stronger, and two things that had been doing nothing started working: the relic that granted +1 Weak per turn (exactly cancelled by that turn's decay), and the shrine Blessing of Strength (discarded at every fight start, before you ever saw a point of it).

Also

13 relics buffed and 2 nerfed · five Resonances rebalanced — Ice, Holy, Aqua and Nature were pure defense with no way to close a fight · Glass no longer decays , so setting it is an investment rather than a countdown · and the Resonance panel now prints what the engine actually does, after years of showing hand-written numbers that never followed a balance pass.

🖥️ Interface

• Your whole deck is on screen. A new column on the left of the battle shows every card in the fight — draw pile in colour, discard grey, spent dark red — and cards fly out of it into your hand and back down when you play them. Hover any of them for the full card face.

• The relic panel is a ledger, one row per relic with its effect inline, instead of an icon grid that hid every effect behind a second tooltip.

• The reservoirs and the Heat gauge explain themselves on hover, with live numbers and the relic riders that apply this turn.

• The run map opens beside the starting-deck draft, so you draft knowing whether the road ahead has rest sites.

• The Codex opens mid-run, shows honest HP ranges instead of first-row values, marks hero-locked cards, prices locked legendaries and counts which relics you've discovered.

• The Card Sanctum got a filter rail, roughly 2.5× the cards per screen, and a full-screen unlock reveal tinted to the card's own element.

• The Forge Anvil is drag & drop. The run progress bar, map modal, resonance tooltip and reward panel all got rebuilt.

• DLC hits have projectiles now — Erupt, Daybreak, Nightfall and the Eclipse payoff were landing damage out of empty air a full second after the meter popped.

🐛 Long-Lived Bugs, Now Dead

• Leviathan's Maw — Tidecaller's mastery legendary — had been dealing 0 damage since the Overflow DLC shipped. It spilled the reservoir it was about to read.

• Pyromancer's Lv12 and Lv14 perks both did nothing, and Stormcaller's Lv12 was a nerf — reaching it made lightning weaker.

• Four heroes' “+1 Strength” perk had been paying out draft rerolls instead.

• Hovering roughly a third of the card pool showed the wrong keyword tiles, or an empty panel.

• Treasure chests never showed their artwork.

• Exhausting curses were being deleted from your run entirely instead of coming back after the fight.

• “HP” was still raw English in Korean, Japanese, German and Chinese — across roughly 550 strings.

📌 Before You Update

• Hero mastery levels were reset when the Passive Tree replaced the old ladder. Everyone restarts at Lv1 on a much shorter, much faster curve — and your boss kills were backfilled from your wins, so the Conquest branch opens with progress already banked.

• Ash, ascension, Forge levels, essence, card unlocks and win counts are all untouched.

• A run saved before this patch will not load. Save slots are versioned and are not migrated across changes this size.

📊 Ashes Remade → Deeper Kingdom, At a Glance

Everything above, as one table. Left column is where the game stood at the last major update.

Localized in English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, French, German and Russian. Thank you for playing Kingdom of Ashes. Bug reports and balance shouting both belong in the Community Hub — most of this patch came out of them.