2026-04-04 Glimmith Update - Languages, performance, bugfixes, and more.

Greetings Artisans,

We have another patch to share with you for The Artisan of Glimmith. This one focuses on adding new languages, improving the performance of the game, fixing bugs, and providing a couple of small quality-of-life tweaks.

Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, and Russian are now live!

You can now play The Artisan of Glimmith in these four new languages.

Other language changes include:

• Substantial updates to the Spanish translation.

• In the French translation, changing the names for Match and Mismatch to Pareille and Pas Pareille.

• Fixing some mistakes in German and Chinese.

• Adding a Cyrillic font for Russian.

• Adding new translators to the credits.

Please let us know if you have any feedback on the translations.

Big performance enhancements

In our last update, we mentioned how we were observing some crashes among players who were trying to run the game on hardware that was well below our minimum system requirements.

Most of these crashes were due to these systems not having enough video memory to support the game. So we asked ourselves, "Could we try to lower the amount of video memory that the game required, particularly on LOW settings, without affecting its visual appearance?"

If we could, it would not only help improve stability for those players, but it might actually allow us to lower the game's minimum system requirements, allowing more Artisans to access the game.

We never spent much time trying to optimize Glimmith's video memory usage during development, because our goal was to get the game's VRAM usage below 3GB (to support 4GB graphics cards) and we were able to achieve that without much effort, so we never tried to push it further.

As it turned out, there were many more savings to be found! In fact, we've improved things so much that we expect that the game, on LOW settings, should be stable even on 2GB graphics cards. This should be a big win for those with older PCs or with integrated graphics only.

The changes made include:

• Optimizing lightmap and shadowmap densities throughout the whole map. This made a huge difference! We were able to reduce the baked lightmap sizes by around 85% with no quality loss (and quality improvements in some cases!) This has a huge number of benefits, including lowering the download and install size of the game, fixing blotchy shadows, reducing video memory usage by hundreds of megabytes, and even reducing the number of draw calls due to better texture packing, which yields a small FPS boost.

• Lowering distance field atlas sizes on LOW quality settings. This saves a massive amount of video memory, and doesn't affect visual quality very much (because LOW settings mainly rely on contact shadows for shadow detail).

• Removing unneeded data from the project. We were able to remove a few more unused textures, remove unused navigation data, and remove a ton of unnecessary quality used for collision meshes (whose only purpose was to block mouse clicks on the map). We also removed adjacency buffers from every mesh in the entire project (since we don't use tessellation), and we removed reversed index buffers from a number of environment assets that never needed them (they're only used if the mirror image of an asset is placed on the map).

• Optimizing triangle counts. Many of Glimmith's building meshes had very high triangle counts—enough that they would look flawless even when viewed up close in first person! But that extra quality is completely invisible when viewed from a bird's-eye-view camera, so we were able to reduce many mesh triangle counts with no perceptible quality loss. Some scenes in the game are now rendering with 30% fewer triangles!

• Adjusting some foliage LOD transitions and distance fades. This one is 80% aesthetic but should reduce the pop-in effect on grass and trees, particularly on HIGH and EPIC quality. Flickering should also be reduced on some meshes like trees and the Glimmith bridge.

• Adjusting texture resolutions and formats. Some textures were being stored in raw, uncompressed formats because their x and y resolutions were not divisible by 4. We've adjusted their resolutions and converted them to DXT5, BC7, and various other optimized formats, which saves a bunch of video memory.

In total, these changes reduce video memory usage by 30-40% across all quality settings. There should be no noticeable reduction in visuals, and there should be several minor visual improvements and a small FPS boost (5-10% on most systems, but it depends on what you're bottlenecked by).

Here's a comparison. This is from the before the changes. This scene has 17.4M triangles:

After, the scene has 12.3M triangles (~30% less) and uses 35% less video memory. There are some minor improvements to shadows and grass-drawing distance, but you otherwise shouldn't notice a difference:

Please let us know if you notice anything that doesn't look right while playing with the updated build, as we messed around with a lot of assets.

Additional tweaks and fixes

Other changes that have gone live in this patch include:

• Added an option in the Settings menu to hide the Check Progress button while in puzzles (for you people that can't stop yourselves from clicking it!)

• Improved the map navigation when playing with a controller or Steam Deck.

• Remade the difficulty indicator graphics and converted them to fully-baked textures (to fix the off-center numbers in them and improve their appearance).

• Fixed a visual bug where the window progress graphic was squished in an early note from Elias Vidimus.

• Fixed a bug where the map would sometimes snap to a different location after exiting a puzzle.

• Fixed an unintended way to click the hidden puzzle on the floating island beneath the Glimmith Overlook.

• Fixed a castle tower that was accidentally colored red instead of purple (no, this was not a puzzle!)

• Fixed a missing wall in one of the red-roofed cottages in the forest.

• Fixed a rock that was clipping through the floor inside one of the houses.

• Fixed some objects that allowed puzzles and windows to be clicked through them.

• Fixed a bug with water transparency sort ordering that made water visible through the fog.

• Fixed a puzzle in the Compass area that had 2 solutions.

And here are some other fixes that we snuck in earlier this week:

• Fixed a bug where the Community Craftsman achievement would fail to trigger (if you should have gotten this achievement but didn't, you can solve any puzzle from the workshop to trigger it, including a puzzle that you've already solved).

• Fixed a bug where error highlights wouldn't update after changing the Show Errors setting.

• Fixed a bug where the restoration progress pop-up could appear while in a puzzle.

• Fixed a bug where the restoration progress text would appear in the wrong place for a frame.

• Removed a performance hitch on mouse-up in note-taking mode.

• Increased the drawable area for note-taking mode.

There are more improvements to come...

Upcoming changes include:

• Controller glyphs (so we can get Steam Deck verified!)

• New features and improvements for the color palette (this is a big change that needs a lot of testing, so thanks for your patience everyone!)

• Adding Polish language support

Happy puzzling!

~ Elyot Grant

CEO and Game Director, Lunarch Studios