Patchnotes: Season 2 Content Update

Welcome back wanderers! The wait is over, after many months of hard work we are hyped to share the full patch notes for the FREE Season 2: Era of Darkness content update.

Official Season 2 Trailer

Stay a while and listen ... and read of course ... This content update is massive and turned out to be much bigger than initially planed and expected. So we included some of the new music coming with Season 2 to set the vibe for reading through this massive patchnotes.

Season 2: Era of Darkness Release

24th of April 2026 at 7pm CEST

Join the Season 2 Release Event

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1646790/view/518618315048879096?l=english

Supporter Pack DLC

We decided to make the content update including the Druid class a FREE update for everyone to not fracture the playerbase and balance the new class without following the meta of overpowering new content to set buying incentives. We therefore packed fun ideas we had for purely non-gameplay affecting cosemtics into a Supporter Pack DLC for those players that want to support the ongoing development of Striving for Light and future Seasons.

Featuring 28 cosmetics including

character back attachements (yes including wings), auras, footstep effects, minipets and boss finisher effects.

You can check it out here

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4606350/Striving_for_Light__Supporter_Pack_DLC/

New Features

New Character Class: Druid

We are happy to announce that the Druid character class will be joining the roaster of Striving for Light in the upcoming Season 2.

The Druid is a naturebound class wielding and bending the power of nature. The druid calls ancient spirits and constructs powerful totems to shift the odds in her battles to her favour.

The Druid comes equipped with 2 new starting weapons: Totemic Staff and Totemic Maul, read more about those new weapons further down below.

The Druid Specialisation will grant you access to following specialisations, opening up a variety of new build possibilities. Take a look at all Druid Specialisations in detail:

• Flicker Dodge: You are shapeshifting into a swarm of fireflies when dodging that trigger 3 melee on hit effect along your dodge path. This limits your dodge regeneration to 1 dodge each 3s.

  

• Call Spirit Wolf: Call a spirit wolf companion on each active trinket trigger that attacks enemies with frozen fangs freezing enemies dealing and scaling with companion damage. Lasting for 20s.

  

  

• Glowing Storm: Call firefly companions on each active trinket trigger that create burning AoE effects on attack that deal burning condition to enemies. Lasting for 12s.

  

• Fireflies: Call firefly companions on each defeated enemy that create burning AoE effects on attack that deal burning condition to enemies. Lasting for 20s.

  

  

• Totemic Slam: 25% chance on all melee and range attacks to spawn a melee totem construct. That frequently errupts earth shockwaves dealing and scaling with your melee damage. 6s construct duration, attacks each 2s.

• FixedTotemic Reach25% chance on all melee and range attacks to spawn a range totem construct. That unleashes a fixed bullet salve which damage scales with your projectile damage. Construct lives for 6s attacking each 2s.
• FixedTotem Mastery50% chance on all melee and range attacks to spawn a range totem construct. That unleashes a fixed bullet salve which damage scales with your projectile damage. Construct lives for 6s attacking each 2s.

Season Lead Mechanic - Sandfall World Event

Scattered across the forsaken lands of Ankerath you will find relics of time itself. Just waiting to release the sands of time.

Sandfall is a time based world event where enduring within the event area will let you collect sands of time. Acumulate sand and trade this new currency into precious and powerful items. Some with beyond ordinary quality, which will grant you a high chance to receiving multiple duplicates of the same item or weapons and trinkets with higher stat rolls and crafting potential.

But beware the longer you endure the more devastating sandfall can become. You can exit the event area anytime but beware once your character gets defeated all sand vanishes like the time itself.

Trinkets

New Fifth Legendary Trinket Slot

The new trinket system will grant all players a new legendary trinket slot, so you will be able to carry 5 trinkets in total.

So you will be able to carry 4 normal trinkets and 1 legendary trinket. The legendary trinket slot is represented by a taller equipment slot. When picking up a legendary trinket you are only able to equip or exchange trinkets in your legendary trinket slot.

Legendary trinkets will not have any requirements (trinket color requirements) and therefore the active ability can be used directly after equipping and charging up the active ability. So you will be free to assemble your trinket setup to your liking by still use whatever legendary trinket complements your build best!

New Trinkets

What would be a trinket system overhaul without new trinkets to play with? We therefore are adding 8 new trinkets. These trinkets will not only add entirely new and exciting mechanics but also opening up new playstyles.

What about an exploration map, granting you a bounty quest? When completing this will reward you with a bonus chest to double your loot on map completion.

A battering ram that will crush boss shields.

A toxin coil that triggers a AoE effect consuming a massive amount of enemy DoT stacks to deal the DoT damage instantly.

A talisman granting you a damage boost that can be prolonged by defeating enemies.

But this is not all, we also worked on trinkets with low ability cooldown time that allow calling temporary companions, triggering hard hitting melee and range attacks or applying massive condition damage.

We are sure that these changes to the trinket system will make trinkets even more fun to use and allow for a big array of new build possibilities.

New Weapons

5 new weapons are added opening up for new playstyles and build possibilities.

• Totemic Staff - A range weapon with 25% chance on attack to create a range totem construct that fires salves of 6 projectiles.

• Totemic Maul - A melee weapon with 25% chance on attack to create a melee totem construct that freuqently makes the earth shatter dealing melee damage to all surrounding enemies.

• Longsword - Rapid attacks with a wide frontal range.

• Butterfly Staff - Unleash forward flying orbiting butterflies.

• Thorn Vine - Each hit applies bleeding to enemies. Attacks in a large area in front of you in a whip-like pattern.

New Skills

The content update will bring new skills to the extensive roster of build possibilities.

Vulcanic Hit - Melee Skill Each melee hit unleashes a volcanic eruption spreading a burning AoE field, setting enemies on fire and applying burning condition, which has a 50% chance to replicate up to 2 times.

Barrage - Range Attack Replacer Your range attacks unleash your projectiles as continuous barrage instead of an instant attack and spread in chaotic movement. You gain +3 additional projectiles.

Opening up even more build variety to take on the new challenges that await you in the Era of Darkness content update.

New True Roguelike Mode: Darkness Modes

With Season 2 the Era of Darkness is spreading corruption on the vast lands around Ankerath, and even breaching the city gates.

The Darkness Mode is a new True Roguelike Game-Mode where no meta progression can be taken to your next run. The darkness mode will grant access to the Tree of Darkness, a corrupted version of the Tree of Light that will grant you more powerful powers for your current run.

Darknessmode brings plenty of further changes to the ruleset of the game, i.e.:

• You are starting with 3 echoes of fate skill slots, and the echoes of fate is always unlocked in darkness mode. The echoes of fate skill spawn chance with +50% (instead of 25%) is increased in darkness mode.

• The blacksmith Goladir and the Scholar Heleja in Ankerath will craft weapons and skillgems

Darkness Mode comes with 3 difficulty tiers and will allow to experience Striving for Light from a Roguelike perspective. On Darkness Mode you can as well select if you wish to play normal or hardcore mode. Which totals up to 4 new ways to experience Striving for Light.

The separate leaderboards will allow to compete against other players where everyone starts at the exact same point on each run.

Each run will challenge you to turn the odds to your favour and requiring a new approach to build crafting. This game mode is perfect for players that want to experience the entire content without spending time to unlock everything first.

New Maps

As the vast worlds around Ankerath remained undiscovered for quite some time now, we decided its time to add new destinations that bring new variations into your journeys and summon new challenges for all travelers brave enough to venture into the darkness for Season 2 once more!

The Skypath

High above the skies lays the skypath. Leading to unknown destinations.

This map focuses on airborn creatures like vultures. And featuring the most complex map design we ever did for a random generated map.

Jungle

Overgrown pathways lay beyond this mystic jungle.

We focused on maps that enrich the palette of available destinations to make your runs as varied and dynamic as possible. These new maps will be available from the start without unlock requirements and will be added into the map pool to bring more variation to the early game progress.

Of course these maps will bring new enemies to hunt down, including unique new gatekeeper bosses and new unique boss weapons to farm. These enemies will enrich the existing world events like the aeodra arena or the descent expeditions to bring even more variation into the game.

Expanded Endgame Map Tiers

With Season 2 we are extending our current 20 endgame map tiers up to infinite map tiers. This will ensure the game difficulty will not plateau at a certain point (we thought no one would ever reach, but got proofen wrong :) ). This will ensure a steady challenge increase to put your build to the test.

New Music

The official soundtrack was extended and is now featuring around ~100 minutes of music. We never thought the official soundtrack would grow to this colossus.

Major Improvements and New Features:

• Improved Damage Numbers: Damage Numbers now display abbreviations for (1k for 1.000 and 1M for 1.000.000). Furthermore the damage numbers now have darker outlines that make them better readable on various backgrounds.

• AdjustedMore Responsive LeaderboardsAs we are now having ten thousands of leaderboard entries viewing leaderboards became unresponsive and sometimes even timed out. Therefore the leaderboard archetecture was rebuild and improved to ensure responsive leaderboard interaction.

• Faded Maps Rework: Faded maps now support more dynamic map background and accurate color grading to align the mixed map appearance with respective map environment.

• AdjustedImproved Effect Culling SystemFor improved performance the effect culling system was extended to also support rotational player effects.
• AdjustedStreamlined TutorialThe game tutorial has been updated and streamlined to make the new trinket system easier to understand.
• AddedImproved AudiosystemMax amount of audio streams have been introduced to prevent audio dropouts
• AddedNew AchievementsNew seasonal challenges and steam achievements have been added.

• Coop Mode: Plenty of improvements and bugfixes for the coop mode. Including controller thumbstick attacks and various crashes.

Balancing

• Heleja Character Specialisation: Blink does not increase dodge cost (was +2 dodge cost before), blink now limits the dodge regeneration speed to 1 dodge each 3s. This makes blink much more useable during early game.

• Active ability cooldown times for legendary trinket have been rebalanced and reduced overall in order to allow for more active use within your builds.

Bugfixes

• Fixed Tree of Light exit buttons showing tooltip hints

• Fixed pause menu triggering when exiting Tree of Light by hitting ESC action

• Fixed bugs causing attack effects not being triggered

• Fixed hidden tooltips on selecting difficulty with steamdeck on the create character screen

• Fixed a crash when entering a map with instant drop of a loot goblin

• Big array of further bugfixes

You are invited to join our official discord. Chat with fellow SfL Players, discuss builds, the new content update or just hang out with us.