Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

• Living weather. Skies drift from clear to hazy, overcast, drizzle, rain and storms, then clear again over the course of an hour or so. Every region keeps its own rhythm: the coast leans drizzly, the woods get the most storms, deserts never rain but whip up the odd dust storm, the Frostmarch snows and sometimes disappears in a blizzard, and Cinderhold lives under falling ash. About one hour in twelve brings something wild: severe storms that turn the day nearly black with driving rain and lightning, blizzards in the north and dust storms in the south.
• Everyone shares the same sky. Players in the same place see the same weather and the same lightning strikes.
• Mist mornings. Some days start with low mist over the water and meadows that burns off as the sun climbs.
• Lanterns earn their keep. When a storm, blizzard or dust storm darkens the day, your lantern, the street lamps and lit windows come on.
• A deeper sky. Clouds now sit high above the world, shrinking and softening toward a bright, hazy horizon, lit pink and gold at sunset and dark against the stars at night.
• New water. Piers, boats, houses and cliffs reflect in the water, shallows are clear enough to see the sand, and the open sea rolls with slow, heavy swells. Wading leaves a soft wake.
• Rain and snow to match. Rain, snow, sand and ash now fall as soft painted streaks that take on the light and fade into the haze.
• Outlines fade out sooner in fog and mist, and arriving by lamp-stone, ferry or home recall shows the new place's weather straight away.
• Settings > Graphics has new Dynamic weather, Water reflections and Painted cloud layer options if you'd like a simpler look.

Interface fixes

Thank you to everyone who reported these after the new interface went out.

• Chat stays with you at crafting stations. Cooking, smelting, smithing, the bank, the Exchange and trades no longer hide the chat.
• New messages wake the chat. When chat is set to Fade, any new message, from players or the game, brings the whole chat back for a few seconds. Hovering it with the cursor free (Alt) no longer makes it fade away.
• The hotbar wakes up when you fight. If your action bar is set to Fade, it now shows in combat, when you press a slot or cast, and while your cooldowns finish.
• Move the progress bar. The bar for casting, gathering and crafting is now its own element in Edit HUD: move it, resize it or switch it off. It also stays up while a crafting window is open.
• Edit HUD makes saving obvious. While you have unsaved changes the editor says so and the Save button glows, and Escape asks before throwing them away. The update notice also waits until you close the editor.
• Clearer names. Names, levels and tags over players and creatures have a stronger outline, so they read on snow and bright sky. The Dev and Mod tags are crisp again in chat, on nameplates and in Inspect (party frames now show just the name), and the channel chip in the chat box takes its channel's colour.

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• One calm, dark look. Every window, from the satchel and shops to conversations and settings, shares the same slim style. Your quest list, buffs, party and chat sit straight on the world with a soft shadow instead of boxes.
• The HUD steps back when you don't need it. Health, stamina and the rest fade when you're out of combat and at full health, and come straight back when something happens. They also step aside while you talk to someone, shop or craft. In Edit HUD (Shift+F9 or the Esc menu) you can set any element to Fade, Always or Off, hide it in combat, move it or resize it. Hover any name to see what it does.
• A lighter hotbar. Slots 1 to 8 sit on their own, with health and stamina bars beside them. Empty slots only appear while you're placing something. Your mouse attacks and dodge live on their keys now, and your crosshair shows their state: the right arc is your guard meter when you carry a shield. A second hotbar row is in Edit HUD if you want it.
• The crosshair tells you more. A small ? replaces it when your cursor is free, and the "Talk to" or "Gather" prompt sits right beside it with its key.
• One menu button. The grid at the top right is now Satchel, Gear, Journal and Map, each with its key, plus a menu with everything else. The satchel shows how much space you have left.
• Herald's Ledger is one click away, at the top right and in the Esc menu, with a gold dot the moment you can vote again.
• Quests at a glance. The tracker shows each quest's next steps with counts and a small compass pointing the way. It scrolls when you follow lots of quests. Bounty contracts now have their own tracker that counts your kills.
• Better tooltips. Items show their tier, every stat with arrows against what you're wearing, and their coin value. Gear compares with what you wear straight away, and Shift shows more on both cards.
• Gear & Stats in one view. Your character stands in the middle with your gear on both sides, and every stat is always visible on the right. Mounts show their speed.
• A new crafting window. Recipes are sorted by type (Weapons, Plate, Leather, Warhide and more) and by tier. A Ready filter shows what you can make right now, each material shows how many you have, and missing materials say where to find them. The Craft button never scrolls away.
• Banks remember their place. Right-click a bank slot to lock it in place or keep it as a placeholder, and coins always go back to their own slot.
• Level ups feel like level ups. A golden burst marks every new level, with something bigger at milestones and when you master a skill.
• Easier to learn. The opening tutorial now also shows you how to zoom, use your spellbook, put food and abilities on your hotbar, and keep a window open while you move.
• Windows behave. Escape closes any window or menu, buy and craft buttons always stay in view, the shop can be resized, and the pin in a window's header keeps it open while you run around.
• Smaller touches. Chat lines keep their channel colours, the camera starts a little closer, carter posts and raider posts appear on your map once you've found them, the minimap icons are easier to tell apart, and your own damage numbers stand out from other players'.

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What progression should feel like

Every level in Whispered Scrolls should mean something. Reaching a new tier of gear or a new ability should feel earned, and as such be rewarding and a clear accomplishment.

The content we build should keep its value. A zone, a dungeon or a quest line should be worth doing when you reach it, instead of something you outlevel before you've seen it.

We also want progress to come from exploring. The best way forward shouldn't be standing in one spot. It should be heading out across the Aethermere to find the places, people and secrets it's hiding.

We measure every balance change against those goals, this one included.

How we look at progression

Before we set any experience rates, we decide how long each level should take, based on the goals above. Then we tune the rates in a simulator until they hit those targets. The simulator plays a character from level 1 upward through every skill and measures the hours each level takes. Once the game is live we compare it with what really happens, using the play data the servers collect: experience per hour of play for every skill at every level, which monsters get fought, and every coin that enters or leaves the game.

What the live data showed

• Below level 30 or so, fighting, gathering and crafting all moved at about the same pace, close to what the simulator expected.
• Above that, fighting pulled far ahead. At levels 40 to 70 it earned 2 to 3 times the experience per hour of mining or woodcutting, and at 70 and up it reached around 9 times. The simulator assumes one fight at a time. Real players at high level fight in groups, and we've added new tracking to measure that properly.
• Coins were running away too. Monsters made about 80% of all new coins, frost wolves alone made a quarter of them, and the amount of coin in the world grew by about 2.2 million in a single week. That can lead to market prices being pushed up for everyone, and newer players would feel it most.
• Bounty was overpaid in two ways. A contract paid for the monster's level rather than yours, so a new hunter could jump twenty levels on one hard contract. And dungeon contracts were priced for a 30-minute run when real runs were taking about 9 minutes.

What changed

Combat experience now grows steadily with a monster's level and is lower overall, which puts combat in step with mining and fishing.

Total hours of fighting to reach each combat level, before and now:

• Level 20: 0.6 hours before, 1.1 now
• Level 30: 1.5 hours before, 3 now
• Level 50: 4 hours before, 9 now
• Level 70: 11 hours before, 27 now

• Dungeons now pay more experience than fighting in the open world, so a delve is worth the trip.
• Only monsters that would carry money drop coins: bandits, goblins, cultists, hags, ogres, the undead who were once people, slimes, wyrms, treants and imps. Wolves, boars, bears, crabs, spiders, golems and spirits keep their hides, bones and other spoils but no longer drop coins. A monster's coins match its level, and monsters far below you drop far fewer.
• Bounty contracts are now the steady way to earn coin from hunting. Finishing one pays a purse worth 150% of what its targets would drop if they carried coin, and your streak grows the purse.
• Bounty trains at about the same pace as your weapon skill while you work a contract, and a contract pays its experience at your own Bounty level. Finishing it adds a flat 50% bonus. Dungeon contracts pay for every foe you defeat inside and name the dungeon's final boss as the goal.
• Bounty contracts that ask for a leader, such as a Greyhand Captain, now count that leader at any of their camps.

Your levels

To be fair to everyone, we recalculated combat experience earned above level 20 at the new rates, as if they had always been in place. Levels 1 to 20 are untouched, since early combat was never out of line and quests carried most of it. Bounty was rebuilt from the contracts you finished, at the new rates. If your levels changed, you'll see a note with the details the next time you log in. Gear you can no longer use has been moved to your satchel or bank. Nothing else was touched: your items, coins, quests, gathering and crafting skills are all as you left them.

Our approach during alpha

Whispered Scrolls is in open alpha, and part of an alpha is finding where the game is out of balance. Most of the time we fix that by changing rates going forward. When something is far enough off that it splits the community, as fighting at high level did here, we may also adjust progression that was earned on the broken rates. When we do, we'll show you the data behind it, apply the same rule to every character, leave early levels alone, keep your items and coins, and tell you exactly what changed on your character.

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Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

The world

• Hand-painted skies by day and night, with clouds that drift slowly overhead.
• The ground is painted too, with its own colours for every region: meadows, sand, snowfields, tundra, marsh, autumn woods, pine forest, heath, canyons, volcanic ash and the Lampless Reaches.
• Each region has its own light and mood. Swamps sit in a green haze, the north is cold and blue, and mornings everywhere come in warm and golden.
• Roads are soft packed dirt in the wilds and paved stone in towns, and they blend into one another neatly where they meet and fork.
• Grass is thicker and full of wildflowers.
• Trees have painted leafy crowns, and pines and willows have been redone to match.
• Caves and dungeons get painted rock walls and floors, including both cave systems in the Lampless Reaches.

Water

• Seas, lakes and rivers have been redone. Waves roll across open water, foam laps the shore, and rivers run downstream with the current.

Footprints

• You, other players, creatures and mounts leave footprints in sand, snow, mud and dirt roads. Every mount leaves its own kind (hooves, claws, bird tracks or little crab dots), and dodge rolls kick up dust or snow.

Outlines

• Outlines now default to Screen-space at 40% thickness on Medium and High, and everyone's outline setting has been reset to this once. You can change it again under Settings > Graphics > Advanced. The ground, grass and anything under water no longer get outlined, and the line stays crisp with anti-aliasing on.
• Trees, rocks, gathering spots and crafting stations now light up with a thick, clean outline around their whole shape when you point at them.

Screens

• A new painted title screen, and a painted loading screen when the game first starts.
• Boats, carts and lifts show a painting of the place you're leaving while you travel, and Lamp-stone jumps, Home Recall and the Reaches skiff get their own painted screens. Dungeon entrances and exits hold a painted screen a little longer, so you can actually see it.

Characters

• The starter tunic fits properly now. Shoulders slope down from the collar into a rounded cap, and the sleeves come out from underneath it instead of sitting on the side like a separate box. It moves with you when you run, swing overhead or cast, and looks right on every build.

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• Shops no longer sell iron or better axes and pickaxes, the Dhurrite Harpoon or the Moonsilver Sickle. Smiths make the axes and pickaxes. The basic lobster pot, harpoon and sickle are still on the shelves.
• The Dhurrite Harpoon can now be forged at an anvil from an Iron Harpoon and three dhurrite bars.
• Barrow Shades now drop Moonsilver Shards. At Fletching 55, fit four of them and a yew handle to an Herbalist's Sickle at a fletching bench to make a Moonsilver Sickle.
• Shopkeepers who fletch will now build pistols, blunderbusses, cartridges and reliquaries from your own materials, and the leatherworkers will stitch toolbelts too.
• Weaving now works like tanning: one bundle of fibre makes one bolt of cloth. Spider silk and wisp thread drops have been adjusted to match, fibre sells for more, and Tailoring gives less XP per piece so it levels at about the same pace as Leatherworking.
• Yetis now carry aether-touched hides and talons, so you can gather top-tier leather in the open world.
• Relics for healer's vestments and the special materials for regional sets drop much more often, so you can farm them at your own level. Goblin shamans and silt slimes now drop prayer beads, and the Ashen Regent carries the Shard of the Scroll of Dawn.

Quests and travel

• A Pot for the Poor now asks you to gather, cook and hand over the same food: 2 roast chicken and 2 seared beef go to Granny Hobb, and 2 of your 4 loaves go to Dilly Fenwick. If you're already on the delivery step, Granny Hobb now wants the 2 seared beef as well.
• Show on map in your quest journal now takes you straight to where the quest wants you, whether that's a person, a place or a patch of things to hunt or gather, and rings the spot so you can't miss it.
• Left your coins in the bank? If you're in a town, the lamp-stones will now take whatever your satchel can't cover straight from your bank. Out in the wilds you still pay from what you carry, and the travel window tells you where the fare is coming from.

Combat

• Enemies now show every debuff on them in tidy rows above their health bar, with the right time left even if the debuff landed before you arrived. This works on monsters and on players you're fighting in PvP.
• Watch for the gold icons. They mean the enemy is invulnerable, enraged, shielded or ready to parry, so you'll know when to back off or wait it out. You can make the icons smaller or larger, or turn them off, under Settings > Interface.
• Wickhaven has a Practice Green now, just off the Lamp Road across from the training yard. Hit the straw dummies as long as you like; they never hit back, and your damage meter pops up while you're there so you can see exactly how hard you hit. Corporal Nell Thatcher keeps the green, and her recruits are usually sparring in the ring.

Sound

• You can now set how loud menu clicks, window sounds and notifications are, or switch them off entirely, under Settings > Audio. Level-up and quest fanfares, other players' level-ups and the ship's bell in the arrival cinematic each have their own switch, so you can mute the menus and still hear the moments you care about.
• Footsteps are softer and fall into a natural stride, and there's a new Footsteps slider if you want them quieter still.
• Heal over time no longer chimes every second. Healers will hear a soft note now and then instead, and the rest of the fight comes through clearly.
• Fishing nets, lobster pots and harpoons now each have their own sounds instead of all sounding like a rod and reel.

Chat

• You can now have your level-ups, XP, crafting results, gathering hauls and pickups written into the System chat. Turn each one on or off under Settings > Interface > System messages. XP and loot are added up into one tidy line, so a long fight or a full batch of cooking won't flood your chat.

The world

• The little sparkles that drifted around street lamps, door lanterns and chandeliers are gone. They looked like something you could click. The lamps still glow just as warmly, and the lamp-stones now shimmer with a few drifting sparks so the fast-travel stones are easy to spot at night.
• Buildings are cosier at night. The bank, inn, smithy and shops fill with warm candlelight after dark, even on lower graphics settings.
• Raising your graphics setting now brings the full lamp lighting with it. If it needs a moment to set up, the game asks first and shows a short "Updating lighting" step instead of freezing, and you can always choose Later.
• Characters standing around now keep their feet on the ground. Idle fidgets, emotes and townsfolk move their hips and arms, but the feet no longer drift or swivel underneath them.
• When nameplates crowd together, the nearest one stays clear and the others step back, so busy squares are easier to read.
• Bats keep their wings beating when they stop to hover, even far away across a field.
• Your hand net, lobster pot and harpoons now look like themselves in your hand and in your bag. The lobster pot finally has its rope, and when you're not fishing it hangs on your back from a rope over your shoulder.
• Every tree you can see can now be chopped, including the trees round the houses in Silverford and the other towns and the forests out in the wilds.
• The quay at Blackwater Landing has rails now, so you can't walk off the edge into the cove. If you ever end up stuck in shallow water with no way out, you'll be pulled straight back onto dry land.

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Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

A lighter game, update by update

Over the last few updates we've been working through what makes the game heavy on your computer, from older laptops to the busiest fights. Here's what has changed, in plain terms:

• In Truer Ping, Lighter Frames, your ping started showing your real connection. Before, a slow frame could make it read about double. Towns also became about a sixth lighter for slower computers.
• In Lighter Crowds, monsters, bosses and characters started drawing in far fewer pieces. That roughly halved the drawing work in a big fight, and on slower computers a busy fight became about a fifth quicker to draw.
• In Lighter Fights, combat sounds started playing from ready-made copies, so a sound you've already heard costs about seven times less to play.
• This update spreads the work of building new arrivals over several frames, so when a crowd shows up at once, the biggest hitch from each newcomer is about a third of what it was. A bandit now takes under a third of the work to draw it did before these updates, and a player a little over half.
• Far-off monsters now share their animation: a whole pack of the same kind is drawn together, almost as cheaply as a single one.

Everything looks and sounds the same.

We're not finished. We're already working on the next step, making big gatherings of players much cheaper to draw, so a packed town or a large fight stays smooth. If the game still struggles on your machine, press F8 in game and tell us where it happens. Those reports show us what to fix next.

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Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

PvP update

Watch The Lampless Reaches on YouTube. Every shot was captured in game.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

• Every melee weapon now reaches twice as far, and melee abilities hit an area twice the size, including Cleave, Whirlwind, Charge, Earthsplitter and the Guard kits. Melee knockbacks and pulls move foes twice as far too. Their tooltips show the new distances.

Duels

• You can now see your own duel record, Carters' Guild rank and notoriety under "PvP record" in Gear & Stats.
• The Gazette now carries news from the roads: staked and best-of-3 duels, raiders' kills, stolen wagons, fence sales, big hauls brought home, and trouble in the Lampless Reaches.
• Even Footing duels now even out gear as well as levels. Each piece of gear counts for no more than the weaker of the two in that slot, and an item facing an empty slot counts for nothing.
• Duels now open with a bow. As the first countdown starts, both fighters turn to face each other and bow.
• When a duel ends, both fighters get a big Victory, Defeat or Draw banner with the score, how it ended and any stakes won or lost. Each round's result also shows clearly before the next round starts.
• The winner lights up with a golden burst, and everyone nearby sees who won in system chat.
• In duels with healing turned off, Restoration weapons and attacks still work. Their healing just does nothing. Abilities that only heal are still off limits, and cleanses work again.

Fixes

• Fixed brief freezes and disconnects that could hit everyone at once after a server restart.
• If you haven't logged in since coins became an item, your coins are waiting safely in your bank instead of your satchel.

Amounts

• You can type 10k, 2.5m or 1b in the bank, shop, drop, market, crafting, trade and duel amount boxes. The box shows the full number so you can check it.

Settings

• Every option in Settings now has a short note explaining what it does. Hover or tap the info icon next to it.

Caravans and Raiders

• Raiders are fair game. Any player can attack a raider, or a wagon raiders are holding, at any level and whether or not they're flagged themselves. Outside towns only, and the road wardens won't shoot you for it.
• Raiders can attack haulers and escorts of a higher level, however big the gap. Anyone a raider hits can fight back for 30 seconds, but raiders can't start on players who aren't flagged. Haulers and escorts far below a raider's level are still safe from them.
• Once cargo is on a wagon it stays there until it reaches a carter's yard, or a fence for a stolen wagon. You can load a wagon but not unload it on the road.
• If you try to take a wagon that isn't yours without a raider's flag, you're asked first. Agree, and your raider's flag goes up as you take it.
• Every wagon you can see now shows on the minimap and the world map, not just your own and your party's.
• With your raider's flag up, you can see every wagon on the road on the world map, however far away it is.
• Carters and raiders' posts are marked on the minimap and the world map.
• Every carter now has a yard with a Guild wagon parked out front, a wheel sign, cargo and a trough. Carters wear a leather cap and go by "Wagons for Hire", so they're easy to spot.
• Raiders' posts look like proper bandit camps now, with tents, palisades, the black flag, bedrolls, torches and piles of stolen cargo, each suited to its land.
• Taking, repairing or walking away from a wagon now shows a timer bar above your hotbar, and players nearby see the bar over your head. If someone starts taking your wagon, you're warned straight away.
• Your raider's flag now counts down on the PvP strip. It comes down after ten quiet minutes, and any fight starts the clock again.
• Road wardens are easier to read. You can see their bolts flying at you, you're told who is shooting, and the death screen names them if they finish you off.

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Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

This is a first pass at all of it. The numbers, the rules and the rewards will all move as we see how the fights actually go, so please tell us what feels wrong, unfair or no fun. Your reports shape the next round.

How PvP Works

• Nobody can hurt you unless you have joined a duel, a caravan or the Lampless Reaches.
• Fights use the weapons, abilities, blocks, parries and dodges you already know. Players deal less damage to each other than to monsters, and the gap grows with level, so a fight between two veterans lasts about as long as one between two newcomers.
• You never earn skill experience from hitting, healing or blocking another player, or from cleansing an ailment another player put on someone. Ailments from creatures pay as before.
• Stuns, roots and silences wear off faster each time you're hit by the same kind in a short space, and then you shrug them off for a while.
• Healing someone who was hurt by a player in the last 10 seconds works a little less well. You can only heal, shield or buff players on your side of a fight.
• Name colours tell you who is who. Red can attack you right now, orange is flagged but can't reach you, blue is your party, and green is a mutual friend. A friend only protects you when you're on each other's lists, and your Friends list now shows who has added you back.
• A new strip under the minimap shows where you stand, the levels you can fight and your combat timer. Click it to read the rules.
• After any PvP blow you're in a fight for 10 seconds. Log out during it and your character stays put until the timer runs out.
• While that timer runs, Lamp-stones, Home Recall, portals, ferries, delves and changing worlds all wait. You'll be told how many seconds are left.
• Portals, and the odd NPC who offers to carry you somewhere, follow the same rules as the Lamp-stones. Haulers, raiders and anyone in the Lampless Reaches have to walk.
• If something that stops you riding starts while you're calling your mount, like a duel's countdown or taking the reins of a handcart, the summon stops.
• You can lock any skill from the Skills window so it stops gaining experience, which is handy for keeping a fair fight at a level you like. Anything you'd have earned while it's locked is lost, not saved up.

Duels

• Right-click a player within 15 m and pick Challenge to a Duel, or use the Duel button on their Inspect window. You can duel almost anywhere, towns included, as long as you're clear of banks, shops and the Exchange.
• You both agree the rules in a window much like trading. Pick one round or best of 3 or 5, the round time, and whether food, potions, healing abilities and each combat style are allowed. You can also go basic attacks only, lock gear, require certain slots to be empty, or fight on Even Footing at the lower of your two levels.
• You can duel someone in your own party. It only makes the two of you fair game for each other, and only for that duel. Once the countdown starts, neither of you can invite anyone to a party or join one until the duel ends.
• A lamp-lit ring appears around you both. Nobody dies in a duel. The blow that would finish you leaves you on 1 health and you lose the round. Step out of the ring for more than 3 seconds and you lose it too.
• Players with accounts at least 7 days old and a total level of 150 can stake coins and tradeable items. The winner takes both purses, a draw hands them back, and there's a daily limit on how much you can stake.
• Hearthmoor has a sparring ring in the court of Guild Row. Hesper Vane, the Ring Master, will set up a duel with one of her rule sets for you and a partner.
• Your wins, losses and draws show on your Inspect window. Duels never give experience.

Caravans and Raiders

Haul a whole wagon of goods home in one trip, if you can keep it out of the raiders' hands.

Hiring a wagon

• Every town with a bank now has a Guild Carter. Talk to them and ask to hire a wagon, or right-click them and pick Hire a Wagon to go straight to the yard. They're happy to explain anything else about the trade.
• There are three wagons:
• The Handcart costs 5,000 coins, carries 600 kg and 15 kinds of goods, and you pull it on foot.
• The Carter's Wagon costs 15,000 coins, carries 2,000 kg and 30 kinds of goods, and you can pull it on foot or mounted.
• The Long Cart costs 50,000 coins, carries 5,000 kg and 45 kinds of goods, and needs a mount.
• Every wagon has a fresh look. The Handcart is a sturdy planked cart with lashed sacks, the Carter's Wagon has painted boards, a canvas cover and a lantern, and the Long Cart is a big four-wheeler in the Carters' Guild green and gold with its own pennant. Cargo piles up on the bed as you load it.
• A contract lasts 90 minutes. Insurance costs 40% on top of the fee and pays back 80% of the fee if the wagon is lost, but not if you walk away from it or the contract runs out.
• One wagon at a time. When you hire, party members close by are asked to join you as escort, and they can load, pull and fight for the wagon.

Loading and hauling

• Load anything you can trade, anywhere outside a safe zone. Coins, quest items and bound items stay with you. Each kind of item takes one slot however many you load, so weight is the real limit.
• The cargo window works like the bank. Open your satchel near your wagon and the cargo opens beside it, then drag or click to load and take things back. Load All and Take All do the lot.
• Anything you pick up or gather within 30 m of your wagon goes straight onto it, kills included, as long as it fits.
• Press E near your wagon to take the reins, and E again to let go. Attacking, blocking or using an ability lets go of the reins too.
• An empty wagon keeps up with you. The more you load, the slower it pulls, down to 95% of your speed on roads with a full load, and a bit slower off the road. You can sprint while pulling.
• If you have a mount equipped, taking the reins of a Carter's Wagon or Long Cart puts you in the saddle. Carts hitch neatly to any mount, the rooster and the Headless Horseman's steed included.
• Your wagon shows on the minimap and the world map. Rings on the ground show how close you need to be to load it and to have pickups land on it.
• Bring it to any carter post and everything on it goes to your bank. Ask a carter to weigh your wagon, or use the button on your wagon card.

The risk

• Hiring a wagon flags you for PvP until you deliver it or walk away. Raiders near your level can attack you, your escort and the wagon. Nobody can fight within 15 m of a town. What you carry yourself is always safe.
• Raiders break a wagon's wheels to stop it. Any of the crew can repair crippled wheels in a few seconds, and the wagon rolls on at reduced strength.
• Leave your wagon with nobody near it for 2 minutes and raiders can take it without a fight. Leave it 10 minutes more and it's gone with its cargo.
• Walk away from a wagon and anyone can take it over, cargo and all, and haul it home as their own. You stay flagged for 60 seconds after you walk away or deliver, and the game tells you how long is left.
• If the server restarts, your wagon is still there with its cargo when you come back, and you get the full grace time to reach it.
• Road Wardens guard the first stretch of the big roads. Bandits and beasts sometimes ambush a wagon on quiet ones, more often the heavier it's loaded.

Raiding

• Hidden raider's posts sit off the roads. Raise the flag with the Bandit Quartermaster, break a wagon's wheels or drive off its escort, then take it and haul it to a fence, who sends the cargo to your bank. A quarter of the load spills in the struggle.
• Watch your back, since other raiders, and the hauler you robbed, can take it off you.
• While you're hauling or raiding, raiders show on your minimap with crossed blades.
• Lower your flag at any raider's post once you've been out of a fight for 30 seconds and have no stolen cargo, or it drops by itself after 10 quiet minutes.
• Haulers climb the Carters' Guild ranks from Drover to Master of the Long Road. Raiders earn notoriety instead.

The Lampless Reaches

• Gannet's Quay has a ferry that sails west to Blackwater Landing, a harbour of wreck-timber shacks where nobody has ever hung a lamp. The quay and the yard are safe. Past the windbreak, they aren't.
• The Reaches go three stretches deep. The Shore has the wreckers' beaches and a warship on her side in Wreck Bay. The Wilds have the Saltblack marsh, the cliffs of the Ribs and Gallows Key. The Deep is ash and black sand under the smoking Sootcrown. Climb the Ribstair to the Lookout Tor to see it all.
• The deeper you go, the wider the level range of who can attack you. On the Shore it's players fairly close to your level, and in the Deep it's anyone at all. Your party and mutual friends can never hurt you.
• Attack someone who hasn't hit you or your party in the last minute and you're Marked for 10 minutes, with a red skull lamp over your head. Fighting back never marks you.
• When you fall you keep your three most valuable belongings and the rest drops in a cache at your body. Coins always drop, bound items are always kept, and dropped worn gear may shatter. Marked players keep nothing. You wake at Gannet's Quay, and the death screen lists what you kept, dropped and lost.
• Every coin you carry drops when you fall out there, so the game now says so. The ferry asks before you sail if you have coins on you, Blackwater Landing reminds you when you step off, and there's a bank strongbox on Gannet's Quay right by the boat.
• Lamp-stones, Home Recall and changing worlds don't work out there. Unstuck still frees you if you're wedged somewhere, but it only sets you down on open ground close by, or just inside the mouth if you're in a cave. It won't take you home. Mags Tidewell will row you home from the Skiff Hole in the Deep for 1,500 coins, if nobody is hitting you.
• The further in you go, the better the ore and the tougher the locals. Gathering out there gives more, and creatures give more combat experience.
• The Reaches are now the richest gathering ground in the game. The Deep holds the densest rich coal, dhurrite, aether, starstone and skystone anywhere, and the Wilds hold a field of 35 adamant under the Liars' Watch.
• Every gathering skill has a reason to make the crossing. You'll find wispwood and aetherbloom groves, beds of Cinderlily, Mountain Herbs, Barrow Herbs, Rimeleaf, Skybell and Starbloom, Moon-web on the Lookout Tor, and schools of deep-sea fish and drowned eels.
• The whirlpools by the Skiff Hole are the only Whirlpool Fishing Spots in the world, and the only place to catch a Moonray. Bring a dhurrite harpoon and someone to watch your back.
• Nodes come back faster the deeper you go. On the Shore they keep their usual time, in the Wilds they return in three quarters of it, and in the Deep in half.
• The best spots sit right at a camp's door or have their own guards, so expect company. At the rich dig sites the ore runs in seams along the hillside, with a big outcrop standing over each one.
• Every fishing spot out there can be fished from ground you can stand on.
• Blackwater Landing's heath rolls in hummocks and dunes, thick with gorse, heather and whatever the storms throw up. The Lookout Tor has a proper summit with the wreckers' cairn flying a scrap of sail, the Ribs are broken cliffs of crags and ledges, and the Sootcrown's crater is all ash, basalt and ember cracks. The Ash Choir never carried a Lamp-stone this far west, so you won't find one in their camp.
• The same grass that covers the mainland grows out here, and it sways and bends round you just the same. It's thick on the Shore's heath, in the wood and round the marsh, thin marram on the beaches and the odd dry tuft on the ash. Ferns and mushrooms fill the saltblack wood, reeds crowd the marsh pools, and the beaches are strewn with driftwood, shells and wreck timber.
• Heath fades into beach and wood into marsh, the way the ground does at home. The Deep keeps its own looks, with black sand on its shore that darkens where the sea wets it, dark ash rock on the Sootcrown's walls and paths trodden into the ash. The paths out here are plain earth, and there's no cobbled road on the isle.
• The roads and trails climb gently, so you can run the Wreckers' Road and the Cliff, Causeway and Gallows paths without long steep pulls. The Ribstair is still a hard climb up to the Tor, as it should be.
• Press M out there and the map opens on the Reaches, with the isle, the paths, the camps, the gem caves, the Lookout Tor and Blackwater Landing, and the Shore, the Wilds and the Deep named across it. The minimap follows you too. A switch under the title flips to Aethermere and back, and a green dot sits on the one you're standing in.
• The whole isle shows on the map from the start. Pins belong to the world you drop them in, 40 to each map.
• Marked players show on your minimap with a skull while you're in the Reaches.

The Reaches Gem Caves

Two caves have opened on the isle, and both are thick with gem rock.

• The Cinder Throat runs under the Sootcrown, deep in the Deep. Its mouth opens in the north-west flank between two stands of basalt, and you walk straight in. There's no door and no loading, so whoever stands in the mouth can see you coming up the black sand, and whoever follows you in is right behind you. The throat is four metres wide all the way along, so a small group can hold it. Past it are the Ash Gallery, the Glass Vent round its slag lake, the Ashbed and, up a short ramp, the Starfall Seam. It has the whole gem ladder, and the top of it is dense, with starstone and skystone in quantity, aether veins, emberstone, and cinderlilies in the ash. The fire-born keep it, inside and at the mouth.
• Bellhoard Grotto is the Lantern Liars' sea cave on the Wreck Bay shore, in the Wilds. They hang the bells they take off the ships in here so nobody can ring for the lost. You'll find the Bell Hoard, the Drowned Pool (you can fish it) and the Captain's Rift up the Bell Stair, with plenty of sunstone, emberstone, tidestone and some skystone.
• Each cave has a pin on the map and a sign by its mouth. To get into Bellhoard Grotto, walk up to its mouth from any side and pick Enter, and you'll be facing into the cave. To leave, use The Way Out at the back of the entrance passage, where daylight comes through the roof, and you come out facing the isle.
• Inside, the Reaches' rules hold just as they do outside. The Cinder Throat counts as the Deep and Bellhoard Grotto as the Wilds. Fall in a cave and you wake at Gannet's Quay like anywhere else in the Reaches, with your cache left where you fell. Log out inside and you log back in inside.
• Gem rocks always run dry when you mine them and take a while to come back, about 20 minutes for skystone and 40 for starstone.
• Going through the Grotto's mouth isn't a Lamp-stone jump, so you can do it mid-fight and anyone chasing you can follow. You need a short breath between passes, though, so you can't hop in and out to dodge a blow. Mounts stay outside both caves.

Reaches Gear

• New materials come from the Reaches: Driftiron Ore, Saltblack Logs, Sea Silk, Wreckglass, Drowned Eels and Brinehide.
• Every Reaches beast can drop Brinehide.
• Crafters turn them into three lines of gear made for fighting players. Wrecker's is worn at level 20, Reaver's at 40 and Lampless at 75, with armour and a weapon for every style, a Hull Shield and jewellery.
• The gear carries Damage to Players, Damage from Players and Tenacity, which shortens crowd control from players. These do nothing against monsters, and the rest of each piece is a tier below its level, so it's no use in the open world. Nothing is sold in shops or drops finished.
• A Lamp Ward, bound at an enchanting altar, saves one extra belonging the next time you fall in the Reaches.

Coins

• Coins are now an ordinary item in your satchel. They sit in a slot like anything else, stack as high as you like, and you can move them, sort them and put them in the bank. Deposit All takes them too, unless you lock their slot.
• Your coins are where you left them. They now sit in the last slot of your satchel, and if your satchel was completely full they went into your bank instead. Nothing was lost.
• The coin total still shows at the bottom of the satchel window.
• Coins have a new icon, and the pile grows the more you carry.
• PvP gear from the Reaches now looks like its own line in your bag. Wrecker's and Reaver's blades take on their line's colours instead of looking like plain steel and adamant.

Horses for Sale

• Odile Fairweather at Reedlight Inn now sells horses. Four of them stand in a new paddock beside her stable, with a trough, hay and a sign by the road.
• The Lamp Road Courser costs 250,000 coins and gives +23% speed.
• The Silverrun Palfrey costs 350,000 coins and gives +26%.
• The Ironcrest Destrier costs 450,000 coins and gives +29%.
• The Starlit Charger costs 550,000 coins and gives +32%.
• You buy them in order. Odile wants to see the horse before it, so you'll need your Moorland Pony for the Courser, the Courser for the Palfrey and so on. You keep every horse you buy.

Other Improvements

• The prompt on screen now always matches what E does. Before, a prompt could show for one thing while E needed you to aim at it.
• Footsteps keep time with your feet at any speed, and walking and running animations match how fast you're actually moving.
• The drovers' ox carts on the Lamp Road are pulled by real oxen now, and the carters who push handcarts round town hold them properly.

Fair Play

• The Report Player window has four new PvP reasons. Pick one and moderators also see the last minute of combat between you and that player, so you don't need screenshots.
• Staff can take someone out of PvP for a while. If they're in a duel they give it up, if they're hauling they step away from their wagon, and if they're in the Reaches they're set down at Gannet's Quay.
• We keep count of how builds, weapons and abilities do against players so balance can follow the fights. It counts builds, it doesn't follow you.

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Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Play Whispered Scrolls free in your browser or on Windows.

Combat update

Watch Steel and Spellfire on YouTube. Every shot was captured in game.

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Combat Effects

• Every ability in every combat style has its own effects and sound, from a dagger's Shadowstep to the biggest Arcana spells. Spells are no longer simple orbs: bolts, lances, chain lightning, novas, storms and runes each have their own look.
• Meteor tears open the sky, drops a burning rock onto a marker that fills as it falls, and leaves a smoking crater behind.
• Heals and buffs glow on the target and on the ground, with sigils, light columns and rising motes. Every buff, debuff and status effect has its own clear look on players and monsters.
• Shield Throw throws the shield you're actually holding, and Hatchet Toss throws your own axe.
• Ground markers are quieter and cleaner, so the abilities themselves do the talking. Your own aim, your allies' spells and enemy attacks each have their own colour, and enemy and boss attack markers darken as they fill so you can see exactly when they hit.
• Holy Fog rolls out as a soft healing mist that settles on the ground, with gentle heal glyphs rising from it. The censer's incense cloud uses the same mist.
• Bows, crossbows, wands, staffs and tomes are much quieter, with short clean shots instead of long ringing tails. A bow's basic shot no longer twangs.

Leaps and Blink

• Leaping Cleave and Vault fly a real arc high into the air, over monsters, fences and low walls, and both reach up to 12 m where you aim. You can't use them to climb onto anything taller than a normal jump.
• You can't be hit while you're in the air during a leap.
• Backstep Shot is a backflip that fires at the top of the flip.
• Blink teleports you up to 15 m to wherever you aim, with a new look. It won't take you through walls or onto rooftops.
• Leaps and Blink void an agility course run.

Spear, Halberd and Flail

• The spear is now a one-handed Guard weapon. It trains and requires Guard, and your shield now shows when you carry one.
• New spear trait, Spearwall: while you guard, the first enemy to step into your spear's reach is struck and stopped.
• Every spear ability has been reworked for spear and shield. Impale taunts, Set Spear is braced behind your shield, and Dragon's Reach protects allies behind you. Vault is now a true pole vault: you plant the spear's tip, flip over it, and land driving the point into the ground. Your hotbar keeps them.
• The halberd can now attack while guarding, at reduced damage, without lowering its guard.
• The halberd's Hook and the flail's Chain Lash reach 8 m and drag foes up to 6 m toward you.
• Pike Wall plants copies of your own halberd in front of you.
• Morning Star Storm spins much faster.

Arcana

• Ley Line is placed where you aim, as a circle.

Gear

• Upgraded gear now looks upgraded. Every weapon, shield and armour piece gains finer craftsmanship at +1, ornament at +2, and a masterwork flourish with a small glowing gem at +3.
• Leather armour now looks like the animal it's made from. Precision leather is sleek, fitted assassin gear. Warhide is savage barbarian armour hung with the bones, tusks, fangs, claws, horns and talons of the beasts you hunted for it.
• Runeblades are blades of living magic: crystal energy blades with glowing cores, orbiting rune rings and floating shards that grow grander with each tier.
• Found gear's claw marks no longer cover the +N tag, and the tooltip explains them.

Graphics

• Ambient occlusion no longer draws faint horizontal lines in fullscreen with MSAA, and now works with FXAA and SMAA too.

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Server Updates

• When the server restarts for an update, you see a Server Update screen instead of being dropped. It tells you when the server is back and takes you straight back into the game, usually in about a minute.
• If an update changed the game, it reloads once and puts you right back where you were.
• Trying to log in during an update now waits and lets you in automatically.
• A small countdown appears under the compass before a restart.

Interface

• The weapon card that introduces each new weapon now appears above your hotbar with a glowing border and a clear Try It button, and shows which mouse buttons attack and block.
• Weapon cards have a Don't Show Again button. Settings > Interface can turn them back on and show the ones you've seen again.
• A small badge above the hotbar shows whether the mouse is aiming (Action Camera) or moving a cursor (Cursor Free), and which key switches back.
• If the game loses your mouse (for example after pressing Esc), it says "Click to resume".
• Left and right clicks that do nothing now show why, like a cooldown or low stamina.
• The Stylist's preview now shows height properly: sliding Height makes you visibly taller or shorter, as it does when you create a character.
• Balance changes can now be applied without a server restart, and your tooltips update automatically.

Halloween

• The Horseman's Scythe is now a tier-1 weapon, so anyone can wield it.
• The Jack-o'-Lantern Headpiece, the Straw Scarecrow Hat, the Headless Horseman's halter and the Horseman's Scythe can now be sold on the market.

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Faces

• Every character has a new nose. It rises smoothly from the brow to a rounded tip and tucks back into the upper lip, with soft wings that blend into the cheeks. Side views no longer show a ball on a stick.

The Stylist

• Odalie Fairweather has opened a chair on the west side of Lamp Square in Hearthmoor. For 10,000 coins she will change anything you chose when you made your character: build, height, skin, face, eyes, hair and facial hair. You see your new look on your own character before you pay, and you can turn it to check every angle.
• Every character that already exists gets one free restyle. Visit Odalie and choose "Use free voucher".

Interface

• Feedback and bug reports are one form now. F8, the Esc menu, the menu bar and the Feedback button in the corner all open it, and the corner button shows its key.
• The Esc menu is shorter and grouped into Game, World and Community. Keybinds live in Settings.
• The Herald's Ledger has its own button in the menu bar.

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Combat

• Provoke and other taunts now pull an idle or wandering enemy onto you, instead of doing nothing until you hit it.
• When an enemy dies, its warning circles and any ground it left behind vanish with it. They no longer linger or flash as if one more hit is coming, and a dead boss's burning pools can no longer hurt you.
• Spears reach 75% further (about 6 m, up from 3.4 m), with the same narrow arc.
• One-handed maces look like one-handed maces at every tier, including Iron and Mithril. They no longer show the big two-handed hammer.
• Spellcut's tooltip names its effects in plain words (Burning, Chilled, Shocked, Rune-whispered).

Gear and loot

• Only crafters can make gear excellent now. Gear from monsters, bosses and dungeons is still a different and often fun pick, but it drops at the strength of a freshly crafted piece of its tier.
• A crafter can rework found, boss and dungeon gear to +1, +2 and +3 at the same station and level as the crafted piece, using three times the materials. It keeps its own stats and look, and the tooltip shows the real cost.
• Monsters no longer drop the exact gear crafters make. They drop found versions instead, like the Warded Bearhide Hood or the Hardy Iron Shortsword: same tier, a different mix of stats. Their icons have claw marks. Gear you already own is unchanged.
• Named monster drops like the Cave-bear Warharness and the Ogre Maul are a sideways pick for their tier, so they no longer beat crafted gear.
• Some uniques hit less hard than before, but they get more stats in return. A few rings and amulets from dungeons and world bosses are noticeably weaker. Extras like the Fair-Weight Ring's added carry weight and worn weapon-trait boosts are untouched.
• Leatherworking beasts now drop their hide on every kill, and their trophy (bear claws, wolf fangs, boar and ogre tusks, wyrm horns) on its own roll at least half the time.
• Dungeon gear can now be traded and sold like any other gear. You can also sell bound gear, like the Cellar Lamp Wand, to shops. Starter kits from Corin, Isolde and the training yard are yours to keep, but shops won't pay for them.
• Fast travel from the map stays. Calling the lamplight from afar now costs ten times the fare, or twice what your satchel is worth if that is more, and the map shows the real price before you go. Lamp-stone jumps and Home Recall are unchanged.

Interface

• Hovering any piece of gear shows what you have equipped right next to it, with up and down arrows on every stat. Weapons compare damage, reach and combo too. The arrows no longer show a pointless 0% change.
• Bound items now say Bound on their tooltip.
• The selected-slot outline in your satchel is much easier to see.
• Every search and filter box has an x that clears it.
• Settings > Loot lets you choose which dropped items show name labels on the ground (all, uncommon and better, rare and better, or none).
• UI scale has a number box: type an exact percentage or step it by 1 with the arrow keys.
• Icon buttons across the game (friends, party and others) now show their tooltips.
• The minimap has filters. Click the new sliders button, right-click the map, or use Settings > Interface > Minimap markers to hide quests, townsfolk, creatures, resources, pins and more. Everything shows by default.
• The combat meter no longer shows fights from a previous character after you log out and in as someone else. Reconnecting with the same character keeps your fights.

Quests and Agility

• Quest arrows now cover every quest task. "Something to Keep" points you at the nearest bank, and the Exchange, notice board, bounty master, innkeeper, Lamp-stone and agility course tasks get arrows too.
• Clicking a quest on the tracker, or right-clicking any of them, opens your journal on that quest instead of the one you looked at last.
• You can stop tracking a quest straight from the tracker card or from its row in the journal list, and add untracked active quests from the list the same way.
• Folding the quest tracker keeps the top quest's title right under the minimap instead of leaving a bare "Main quest" bar.
• The Agility skill's unlock list shows every jump course and the Agility level it opens at.

Emotes and town life

• Dances keep going until you move, and so do the new jig and sway. Clap, sit and kneel hold too.
• Ten new emotes: /salute, /laugh, /point, /shrug, /flex, /yawn, /clap, /jig, /sway and /kneel. Type /emotes to see them all.
• Dance with friends in step: start the same emote next to someone, or type /sync to join whatever the people around you are doing (/sync jig picks one).
• Bellamy the town crier calls each line once, for everyone in the square at the same moment, and you can see it in a speech bubble over his head.
• Sitting on a bench with /sit keeps you on the bench instead of sliding down after a few seconds.

Sound

• Weapons sound weightier and more distinct: greatswords and mauls land deep and long, daggers prick quick and bright, axes and halberds bite, maces and flails crunch.
• Hits sound different depending on what you strike: plate rings, wood knocks, stone cracks and skeletons clack.
• Mobs sound like their attacks: bites and claws tear, clubs and stomps crush.
• Wands, staves and sceptres have their own basic attack sound, which no longer changes to match your last spell. Tomes, bells, censers and reliquaries make a soft sound when you attack too.
• Blocking rings deeper on a tower shield than on a round one, and wooden shields knock.
• Footsteps on bridges sound like planks now, including the stretch over the water and the newer rope, timber and root bridges.

World and art

• The Dunmar Hold signpost by the Stonebrook quarry is back up on the road, not down in the pit. Three more signposts that were standing below their roads moved up to the roadside too.
• The Weavers' Hall in Silverford has a proper floor again, with no grass coming through by the tanning rack. Grass no longer grows through the floors of Hearthmoor's Exchange, the Keep and the guildhouses.
• Lamps indoors are gentler: inns and halls stay warm and bright at night, but walls no longer glow white next to a sconce and you are not blown out standing by the hearth.
• Apple trees look like apple trees: a short orchard tree full of red apples you can spot from across the field. Once it's picked clean, the tree stays standing without its fruit.
• Campfires burn with real, flickering fire, with embers and wisps of smoke over glowing coals. The cooking spit's crossbar now reaches both posts and the pot hangs right in the flames.
• Signposts have wood grain running under the lettering across the whole board, with no pale patch behind the names.
• Leather trousers and other full-length leg armour no longer show skin at the calf, the back of the knee or the heel when you run.

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Halloween event, until November 3

Watch Keep to the Lamplight on YouTube. Every shot was captured in game.

Open alpha

Watch Official Trailer on YouTube. Every shot was captured in game.

Vote rewards

• Open the Herald's Ledger from the game menu (Esc). It shows your votes, when you can vote again, and the rewards you've earned so far.
• Each vote earns a piece of a town crier's outfit: a feathered cap, shoes, hose, gloves, a dagged collar and a tabard. Six votes gets you the full set.
• At 8 votes you get the Herald's Scroll, and at 10 the Herald's Horn.
• At 25 votes you get the Dawncaller Rooster, a saddled rooster you can ride.
• Along the way you can earn three titles: "the Herald", "Town Crier" and "Voice of the Realm".
• The rewards are for looks. The outfit, scroll and horn have the same stats as the tier 1 healer's Vestments, tome and moonstone focus, and the rooster runs as fast as a pony.
• Rewards are tied to your character. They can't be traded or sold, you keep them when you die, and if you lose one you can get it back from the Ledger.
• Votes count for the character you vote from. If your satchel is full when a reward arrives, it waits in the Ledger until you collect it.
• Rewards from the Ledger have their own green Loyalty colour.

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The Headless Horseman

• At half health the Horseman is thrown from the saddle. His horse bolts into the mist, and he gets up and fights on foot to the end.
• On foot he can be tanked: he walks up to whoever holds his attention and stays on them. His blows land harder, and he has two new scythe attacks, the Headsman's Chop (step aside or block) and the Scything Sweep (jump it, step back or block).
• While mounted, he stumbles after his charges, rides and spins and stands still for a few seconds. Get in close: melee hits land 50% harder while he's staggered.
• He now fights every player at their own level. High-level players no longer shrug off his blows or out-damage everyone just by being high level.
• A group of three should bring him down in about eight to ten minutes.
• The fight has four phases, at 75%, 50% and 25% health, and the boss bar marks all of them.
• New rare drop: the Horseman's Scythe, a two-handed halberd with the numbers of a Steel Halberd. Each player who earns the kill reward has a 1 in 20 chance of finding it where he falls. It can be traded.

Event news

• When anyone finds a Jack-o'-Lantern Headpiece, a Straw Scarecrow Hat or the Horseman's Scythe, the whole server sees it in chat, the Gazette lists it and the town criers call it out.
• When the Horseman is slain, everyone sees who took part, in chat, in the Gazette and from the criers.
• Earning a Harvest Token or an event hat tells you how many more you can find today, and you are told when you reach the day's limit.
• The daily limits (40 Harvest Tokens, 3 Jack-o'-Lantern Headpieces and 3 Straw Scarecrow Hats) now reset once a real day, at midnight Mountain Time, instead of every couple of hours, and they are kept when you log out or the server restarts.
• Event items have their own pink Event colour and label instead of showing as bronze.
• If you have turned off Appear in the Gazette, announcements show you as "a traveller".

Bounties

• Bounty now has seven masters. The Lampwardens give contracts from the start, and new masters open as your Bounty level grows: Osric Dunn in Stonebrook (10), Nell Haskett at Gull's Rest (20), Tamsin Reed in Greenwatch (30), Idris Vantor in Sunhaven (40), Brother Anselm Vey at Windbell Abbey (55) and Maeve Corrow in Lastlamp (75). Talk to any master you have unlocked to take a contract.
• Contracts follow your Bounty level, and each master asks for more than the last.
• Sometimes a master names a target: a pack and its leader, such as a camp's bandits and the one who runs them.
• Masters also hand out dungeon contracts: clear a dungeon to fill one. Each dungeon opens as a contract at its own Bounty level, and a party clear counts for everyone in the run who holds it.
• The Bounty skill's unlock list shows every master and every dungeon contract.
• Rerolling a contract now costs more as your Bounty level grows.
• Rare monsters come back after a random 5 to 10 minutes.

Travel

• Home Recall is free, with a 30 minute cooldown shared with fast travel from the world map.
• Travel from beside a Lamp-stone has its own 30 second cooldown, so the two no longer hold each other up.
• If you get stuck in deep water, you are set down on the nearest shore after a few seconds.

Patch notes

• What's New keeps the latest big update at the top, with the patches since listed underneath. Big updates get a proper announcement when you log in; patches only show a quiet note.
• The website's patch notes show big updates as cards with their patches tucked underneath.

Performance

• Smoother frame rates across the open world, and much smoother around the Halloween fields. Far-off creatures are much cheaper to draw.
• Fewer stutters when new characters come into view, like walking into a town or talking to someone.
• The detailed FPS meter (press F7 twice, or Settings > Detailed FPS meter) shows how many creatures are nearby and where each frame's time goes. A bug report sent while it's on includes its last 30 seconds.

Fixes

• Nameplates and chat bubbles sit over a mounted rider's head on every mount, and chat bubbles sit closer to your head when you're on foot.
• An agility course's finish card shows the same time the leaderboards keep.
• The target frame no longer blinks green and red when you target yourself while regenerating health.
• Holding left and right mouse to run forward now works in mouse-look (hold both for a quarter of a second).
• Quest arrows and trackers no longer show internal names like jewelers_bench.
• Mithril is now spelled Mythril everywhere.

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By night

• Cursed Jack-o'-Lanterns fill the fields around Hearthmoor and all along the Lamp Road, and gather outside every other town. About one in ten drops a Harvest Token, and one in 300 drops the Jack-o'-Lantern Headpiece, a carved pumpkin head with glowing eyes. You can find up to three headpieces a day.
• The Headless Horseman rides out of the mist at dusk on a burning skeletal warhorse, carrying its own head as a lantern. It hunts the Lamp Road between Hearthmoor, Silverford, Wickhaven and Fallowmere, and it will ride down anyone it sees. When it starts a fight, everyone hears where it was sighted.
• It is a real group fight: four players at level 10 should need about ten minutes, and fighting it alone is not realistic. It keeps moving and circling between attacks, its attacks reach far, and it has three phases, getting faster and fiercer at two thirds and one third health.
• Watch for the scythe, the hurled head, the spin and the trample, and its new Reaper's Ride: it gallops back and forth through the fight, dragging its scythe along a marked lane. The trample, the spin and the ride can't be blocked, so dodge them. It has its own fight music, and only players in the fight see its health bar.
• Bring it down before dawn and everyone who fought it gets the Headless Horseman mount and the title Horseman's Bane. You need to land a real share of the damage for your level and be close by when it falls. Your share starts over if you die, or if you stay more than 30 m away or offline for over 2 minutes. Its halter drops where it fell. Ride off at dawn and it is gone until the next night.

By day

• The Harvest Fair: Hollow Scarecrows have climbed down from their posts, and the fields around Hearthmoor and along the Lamp Road are full of them, with more on farms across the realm. About one in ten drops a Harvest Token, and you can earn up to 40 tokens a day. One in 300 drops the Straw Scarecrow Hat, up to three a day.
• Marigold Thatch keeps the Fair stall in Exchange Square, and it opens straight to her token exchange. Trade your tokens for the Harvest Scarf (3), the Harvest Mantle (10), the Harvest Hood (25) or the Harvest Cloak (200). Tokens can only be spent while Halloween runs.

For everyone

• Take part in any of it and you earn the title Hollow Harvester.
• Jacks and Hollow Scarecrows fight alone: hitting one never brings its neighbours running.
• Mobs that chase you no longer line up in single file. A pack spreads out and comes at you from several sides, and mobs stop walking into each other.
• Every town is dressed for Halloween: carved pumpkins on doorsteps and lamp posts, corn stalks, straw bales and bunting over the streets.
• Nights are darker. Lamps and torches matter more now.
• The Halloween welcome card shows each time you log in, with what to look for and when the event ends in your own time. It frees your cursor so you can click Got it. New characters see it as soon as the opening scene is over.
• When every world gets busy, a new one opens by itself. Pick it from the world list, even with a brand-new character. Quiet extra worlds close again once everyone has left.
• Friends who are online have a Join World button that takes you to their world.
• The camera sits higher when you ride a tall mount.

Mounts

• Mounts are now items: each one is a halter you wear in the new mount slot in your equipment. Halters can be traded, banked and shown off, and the bank has a Mounts filter. Any mount you already had is waiting for you as a halter.
• Halter icons now show the mount itself.
• If your bank is holding items past its space, you are told when you log in.

Quests and travel

• Lamp-stone travel: standing beside a lit stone, you can travel again after 30 seconds. Calling the lamplight from anywhere else costs ten times the fare and locks travel for 30 minutes.
• The Keeper's Light: while you climb the Gullstone Light, the quest arrow points at the top of the tower. Once you are up, it points to the Lamp-stone in Wickhaven square, then back to Ida.
• Hoofbeats on the Lamp Road: talk to Odile at the Reedlight Inn first, then find Bramble in the reed beds. She follows you home to Odile, and only you can see her. If you lose her along the way, she catches up and appears beside you again.
• A Letter for the Warden: Brother Ansel now sends you to Tam Oxley at the Carters' Line in Silverford, who owes Ansel a favour and gives you a free cart ride to the Wagon Yard just outside Hearthmoor.
• Bold words in quest text now show as bold instead of with asterisks.
• Agility courses pay xp on every clear, and each checkpoint pays every time you reach it in order. No more waiting between runs.
• Every finished course run now goes on the leaderboards. Fast runs are no longer refused.
• Tools of the Trade and the fletching quest now say exactly how to whittle: right-click the knife, choose Use on, then click your logs.
• Quest text, toasts, the tracker, map labels and item tooltips now always show your own key bindings, so a rebound key is never wrong and no raw text slips through. Reward lines show proper names, like Chart: Wickstrand Coast.
• Brother Ansel now sends you to Tobin at the bank before Hallie, and Ink and Runes points to the jeweler's bench beside Hearthmoor's smithy.
• Bramble's dialogue uses the same scroll portrait on every page.
• Cutscenes only skip when you press Esc (or Menu on a controller). Moving or clicking no longer cuts them short.
• Talking to Steward Lisbet Thrum no longer plays the Lamp Tower view early. It now plays when you reach the lantern deck.

Looks

• Faces: the line between the lips is now a soft shade of the lip colour instead of a dark bar. Moustaches sit between the lip and the nose, and goatees and full beards join up with them.
• Distance fog and the atmospheric haze now work together: far hills and forests fade into the sky colour at day, dusk and night, without showing where the detail stops.
• Shadows fade out gently at the edge of their range instead of stopping at a hard line.
• Fishing spots have a new look: ripples spread across the water, bubbles rise, the water glints, and now and then a fish leaps out. The blue fins sticking out of the water are gone, and spots are easier to see at night.
• The Headless Horseman's horse shows only its fire, with no glow inside, and its halter icon fills the frame.

Interface

• The pack slot now sits under the feet slot in your equipment, with the bottom row centred.
• The minimap starts with north up. If you already changed this setting, yours is kept.
• Level-up fanfares wait until quest and zone banners have gone, and play lower on the screen.
• The weapon tab above the hotbar no longer sits on the stamina bar.
• Removed a stray market awning in Hearthmoor.
• Crafting: highlighted recipes are easy to read, and hovering a recipe's icon shows the item.
• Every tracked quest now has its own direction arrow in the quest tracker.
• Keys named in dialogue, quest text and system messages show as key buttons, like on the controls card.
• Titles read as short names above your nameplate: Thawbringer, Swiftfoot, Linekeeper, Lamplighter, Lamp-Sleuth, Asker and Titan-Stiller.
• Wickhaven's harbour and smithy are rearranged, there are new dock cranes, and a few crafting stations have moved to better spots.

Polish

• The website has a new look and new wording, with a new tagline: "Aim every block, arrow, spell, and strike."
• Ability and status tooltips now show exact numbers. Arcane Up's heal bonus now correctly reads 5%, and Defiant Stance says it doubles threat.
• Clearer hints, loading tips and messages throughout the game, consistent Bank and Satchel naming, and tidier lines from a few trainers and codex entries.
• Fixed a slow memory leak from character heads and far-away scenery on long sessions.
• Bug reports now say what caused a freeze, for example a graphics driver stall.

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The capital

• Hearthmoor now has walls, seven gates and seven wards, each burning its own lamp colour. Climb the Warden's Lamp Tower for the first big view of the world, and walk the top of the Lampwall, which is also a jump course.
• The Hollow Exchange has moved to Hearthmoor, into its own hall. Your offers and your coins are safe; a letter in your journal tells you where it went.
• New in the capital: the Delvers' Board, guild row, a wagon yard, Exchange Square and a market of clerks, criers and craftspeople.
• Silverford is now the river port, with the Weigh-House and a wharf. The Long Carts run a passenger service between Silverford and the Hearthmoor Wagon Yard, and a lift, the Long Ladder, runs at Highroad Rest.

Wickhaven

• Wickhaven is a proper first hour: the quay, the net row, the chapel and the Gullstone Light, which you can climb all the way to the gallery. Look north from the top.
• New quests: The Keeper's Light, Something to Keep, The Sea-wall Steps, Who Pinches the Lamps and The Chalk Galleries. The Sea-wall Steps are the first jump course: run, then jump from stone to stone.
• Beyond the Quarry Cut lies the first cave you can walk into, the Chalk Galleries.
• Corin Vale's chest offers one of five one-handed starts: a dagger, a sword and shield, a wand, a healer's tome, or a flintlock pistol with 200 cartridges. You also get a torch. There is no starting armour.
• Yellow quest arrows point new players to their next goal until they leave Wickhaven.

Caves

• Every region now has a cave you can walk into, 25 in all: the Smugglers' Grotto, the Greystope Adit, the Lantern Undercroft, the Charcoal Galleries, the Bellows Lava Tube and more. Some are dry, some are flooded, some have a second floor reached by ladder.
• Each cave has a chronicle page that fills in when you explore it.
• The minimap shows where you are underground, and cave sounds change with the room.

Camps and rares

• Monsters now gather in 55 camps, each with its own faction, kit and leader, and a leash so they stay home. Camps are spread into small packs, so walking in no longer pulls twenty-odd monsters at once.
• Shore crabs, cows, chickens, deer, boars, green slimes and giant crabs fight alone: hitting one no longer pulls its neighbours.
• 31 rare monsters are announced by the town criers and on notice boards.

Roads and bridges

• Every road was laid again so it follows the land: no more wading across rivers on the road, no more zigzags on flat ground, and signposts at every junction.
• New bridges you can walk across and under: the Toll-Thief Bridge, the Wind's Post rope bridges, the Moss Bridge, the Carters' Gate passage, and open trestles over the deep gullies.

The land

• Cliffs, ravines, mesas, karst towers, dunes and terraced hillsides now shape every region, and buildings, camps and props stand level on them instead of floating or sinking.
• You can no longer walk straight up a near-vertical cliff. Players and monsters have a walking slope limit of 45 degrees, and graded ramps and railed stairs were added wherever a route needed one.
• Climb a tower, a gallery or a beacon in every region: each one charts the region on your world map the first time you reach the top. At dusk the Lamp-stone chain lights up across the world, and lamplighters and net haulers go about their rounds.
• Every wild tree can now be chopped. Its look tells you the region; hover over it to see which wood it gives. Rimebound Pines grow in the far north of Frostmarch.
• Iron and above now come from named, guarded places: dig sites and caves.

Towns and quests

• Every town and hamlet has its own look, landmark and notice board, and every region has a lookout, a camp, a cave and new quests of its own: 47 new quests in all.
• A new lesson quest, Something to Keep, teaches the bank. The tutorial ends with the Wickhaven quest chain.
• New titles to earn: Breaker of Silence and Lamplighter of the Marches.
• A wayfarers' guide and new place names help you find your way.

Jump courses and Agility

• New jump courses: the Sea-wall Steps, the Lampwall, the Wind's Post rope bridges, the Windwhisper climb and the Stonebrook quarry benches. Each checkpoint pays a little XP and the finish pays the bulk.
• Every course has daily, weekly and all-time leaderboards. Course starts glow and show a floating Agility icon, and a trail and map line guide you during a run.
• Agility rebalance. Agility from sprinting and dodging is now a tenth of its old rate, and Agility XP already saved is cut to a tenth to match, so some levels will drop. Jump courses are the way to train Agility.

A new look

• Softer, deeper light: sun shadows that stay crisp near you and reach far into the distance, contact shading where things meet the ground, a rim of light round characters, and a colour mood for every region and time of day.
• Light shafts, drifting cloud shadows, fog that settles in the valleys, and over Frostmarch at night, the northern lights.
• Weather by region: snow in Frostmarch, rain in the heartlands, ash in Cinderhold and dust in Sunscar and the caves.
• Water comes alive: foam on the shore and round piers and rocks, glints on the waves, and wakes when you wade.
• Ink outlines, trees and grass that sway in the wind, and grass that parts as you walk through it.
• Settings > Graphics (Advanced) lets you turn each of these on or off and set its strength. Your quality preset picks sensible defaults. On Low, effects the preset cannot run are greyed out.

The Gazette and chat

• The town criers and notice boards now tell the news of the realm: deaths of note, new leaders on the hiscores, course records, realm firsts and big level milestones. Notice boards have a Gazette tab and a Records page. Rather stay out of the news? Turn off Appear in the Gazette in Settings.
• Whisper someone with @name. You can see when someone is typing, speech bubbles appear over the heads of people talking near you, and chat shows bold text.

Combat, crafting and dungeons

• A boss fight with several foes now shows one results page when the fight is over, not one for each foe.
• The Whisperbound Cache is now tracked separately for Normal and Lamplit, and Lamplit opens its own Lamplit Cache with Lamplit Marks.
• New self-cast modifier: hold the back mouse button (Mouse 4) while you use a heal, ward, cleanse or ally circle to put it on yourself.
• Pitch torches burn for 30 minutes (it was 6), and the held torch has a flickering flame.
• Knife work: right-click the knife, then Use, to whittle wooden bolts and to craft bolts or stone-shot cartridges in groups. A knife on a bone makes thunderpowder anywhere.
• Recipes are never open before the level of the skill that makes their material, so 136 recipes moved up a few levels. Boar tusks now match the Warhide hide rate.

Interface and controls

• The camera zooms out further (24 m), and a new Camera height offset setting raises or lowers the view.
• New name size slider, a "Show my own nameplate" setting, a Reverb intensity slider in Audio, and an option to keep the full frame rate when the window is unfocused.
• The hiscores have an Overall board ranked by total experience, on the web page and in game.
• After 15 minutes without doing anything you are logged out, with a warning a minute before.
• The world map zooms further, shows walls, gates, towers, buildings and bridges, and has place pins with a legend, plus readable custom pin icons and names.
• The journal can be searched and resized, and the quest tracker can be collapsed.
• The spellbook's groups start collapsed, and the skill bar starts empty.
• One character per account for now. Accounts with more characters keep them.

If you logged out somewhere that changed

• If the ground, a wall or a hall now stands where you logged out, you wake at the nearest Lamp-stone and a notice tells you why. Everything else in your character is untouched.

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Interface

• New HUD edit mode: open it from Settings > Interface > Edit HUD, or press Shift+F9. Drag the minimap, menu buttons, action bar, chat, player and party frames, buffs, target frame, compass, quest tracker and more wherever you like, and resize any panel from 50% to 200%.
• Panels snap to the screen edges, the centre and each other (hold Shift to place them freely). Reset one panel or everything at any time. Your layout is saved to your character, so it follows you to any computer.
• HUD edit mode also works with the keyboard: Tab picks a panel, the arrow keys move it, +/- resize it, Enter saves and Esc cancels.
• Settings has a search box: type to find any setting across all tabs, including key bindings. Esc clears it.
• Crafting categories can be collapsed and expanded, with Collapse all / Expand all. Your choice is remembered on this device.
• Bug report screenshots now include your HUD and open windows, exactly as you saw them. The report window itself stays out of the picture.

Map pins

• In cursor mode, right-click the ground to drop a map pin there. Right-click a tree, rock or fishing spot to pin it with that skill's icon.
• Map pins can use any skill's icon. They show on the map, the minimap and in chat.
• Clicking a pin someone shared in chat opens your map on it, with rings that make it easy to spot.
• New My pins tab on the world map: jump to any pin, edit it, track it on the compass, or remove it. There's also a "Pin where I stand" button.

World

• Signposts show the place name on both sides of every board.
• The old three-armed signposts are gone. Every road leaving a town now has a two-way signpost: one board points back to the town, the other to the next place along the road.
• Signs by danger zones name the places each way along the path, and pointless posts on dead-end tracks outside town are gone.
• Captain Dunne no longer stands inside a garden fence in Hearthmoor.

Combat

• Leaping Cleave shows its cleave cone while you aim it and where you land, so you can see exactly what it will hit.

Fishing

• Each fishing tool now catches its own fish. The Lobster Pot uses one Fish Scrap as bait per catch and catches lobster; without scraps it won't fish, and the game tells you why.
• Harpoons need no bait. They catch swordfish at sea from level 45 and sharks in deep water, and never bring up lobster.
• Rods (with feathers) work rivers, ponds, lakes and marshes. The Hand Net works the shallows.
• Carrying both a pot and a harpoon? Bring Fish Scraps to pot lobsters, or equip the harpoon to spear swordfish.
• Tool, bait and fishing spot descriptions, the fishmonger's tips and fishing quest text now give the right tools, bait and levels.

Characters

• Mounting while sitting ends /sit instead of leaving you in a sitting pose on your horse.
• Jumping on your mount no longer leaves your arms hanging down.
• Leather jerkin hem flaps now move with your legs, so your thighs no longer poke through them.
• Fixed shadows shimmering on moving characters and their gear, like a shield on your back while you run or ride.

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Loot

• Stackable items such as feathers show as one row in the loot window, with their piles combined; clicking the row takes all of them (Shift-click takes just the nearest pile). Other items keep one row per pile.
• Sort by nearest, value, tier, rarity or name, search by name, and filter by rarity or kind. Each row shows its value, and hovering shows the full item tooltip.
• The window can stay open all the time (the eye button in its header) or appear only when loot is nearby, as before.
• Auto-loot rules, like coins: right-click a row (or an item in your satchel) to always or never auto-loot it, or hide it from the window. Farming hides? Set them to always, or turn on "items you already carry".
• New Settings > Loot tab: window mode, default sort, auto-loot by kind, rarity or value, and your always, never and hidden lists.
• Auto-loot pauses with one quiet notice when your satchel is full or you are too heavy, instead of trying again and again.
• Stackable drops such as feathers land in one pile on the ground, with one label, instead of several.
• New Session haul window: everything you have looted this session, total value, coins, per-hour rates and a per-item list. Open it from the loot window or Settings > Loot, or bind a key under Keybinds.

Combat

• Pressing Esc or opening a menu while holding attack no longer leaves your bow (or other weapon) firing on its own.
• Dropping your guard to use a quick ability like Lunge gives your normal run speed back straight away.
• Raising your guard stops gathering and crafting.
• Aimed Shot and other shared shots show their real damage % on crossbows, longbows and guns.
• Volley circles and other ground telegraphs now show on dungeon floors.
• No more target ring under your own character.
• Repeating status effects such as Floodwater no longer replay their sound and effect on every refresh.
• Beacon of the Reliquary now unlocks at level 42, like the other Restoration kit answers.

Quests

• A Pot for the Poor: the quest marker moves on to the next person after you hand something over, talking to someone you already delivered to says so, and the quest names Stonebrook and Kettlewell correctly. Other two-person deliveries work the same way.
• Drowned Sailors now drop the Drowned Pearls your quest needs, while you still need them.
• Tanner's Trade asks for Leather Bracers, matching the recipe at the bench.
• Story scenes wait until you are out of combat, so monsters can no longer hit you while you are stuck watching one.
• The quest journal has a search box.

Interface

• The weapon primer's Try it button works on the first click.
• Cancelling a dungeon ready check gives you your mouse-look cursor back.
• Dungeons no longer show the wrong overworld zone name when you enter.
• The level-up banner is smaller, higher on screen and see-through, so it no longer covers a fight.
• The feedback and bug report window can be dragged and no longer dims the game.
• Window titles stay readable on narrow windows.
• Chat shows the channel as soon as you type /world, /p, /y or /s, and Tab in an empty chat box cycles channels (Shift+Tab goes back).
• The crafting window remembers your Can make and Have materials filters (Can make is on by default), and its skill XP bar is no longer cut off.
• A new tip near a banker explains the bank once your satchel starts to fill.

Items

• Burnt food now says "Drop it." (it cannot be sold).
• Pike gives more fishing XP and heals a little more, so it sits between salmon and eel.

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Dungeons

• Boss arena doors no longer slam shut the moment a boss is pulled. They stay open for 15 seconds so the rest of your party can still get in.
• A banner counts down "The doors are closing" for everyone in the dungeon, and the gate lowers in its arch with a glow and a rumble before it lands.
• Standing on the Winch Platform during Foreman Rattlejaw's fight, or in similar side nooks of other boss arenas, no longer resets the boss every few seconds.
• A boss pulled out of its arena and still outside when the doors shut now resets.

Gear

• You now have two ring slots, and both rings count. A new ring goes into an empty slot first; drag it onto a ring slot to choose which one it replaces.
• The Pack slot moved to the bottom row of the equipment panel to make room.

Food and potions

• Food no longer has a cooldown. It is your everyday heal.
• Health potions heal 50% more but share a 5-minute cooldown, so save them for emergencies. Stamina, focus and buff potions are unchanged.

Skills

• Fishing can miss: the fish gets away 40% of the time at a spot's level requirement, 1% less per level above it, down to 5%. A miss still uses your bait and gives half the XP.
• Cooking: your chance to burn food drops evenly with each level until it reaches 0%. The crafting window shows your current burn chance and the level where burning stops.
• Gathering spots that can give more than one item say so, e.g. Heather Tuft yields Meadowsweet or Fernroot.

Controls

• New Gameplay setting for moving with a window open: close the window (default), stay still, or keep it open while you walk.
• New mouse options: swap the left and right buttons, hold both buttons to run forward, and drag with the middle button to turn the camera.
• Removed the middle-mouse lock-on and its keybind.

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Graphics

• Low and medium graphics no longer smooth away narrow terrain: sand no longer covers the Wickhaven dock, and characters no longer sink into piers and bridge decks (it was only how it looked; movement was never affected).

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Report a Player

• Report a player who is harassing, spamming, scamming, cheating or using an offensive name: right-click their name in chat or their character in the world, use Report… in the inspect window or the friends list, or type /report Name.
• Pick a reason, add details if you like, and keep the screenshot or leave it out. Moderators see recent chat from and with that player, taken from the server's own record. Your report is private.
• Tick Also ignore this player to stop hearing from them at once.
• To make reports useful, the server now keeps recent chat (local, world, trade, party and whispers) for 14 days. Moderators only see the part that involves the reported player.

Moderators

• The realm now has moderators. They wear a teal Mod mark on their nameplate and in chat, and the developer wears a gold Dev mark. Nobody else can show one.
• Moderators can warn, mute and disconnect players who break the rules, and help stuck players. Everything they do is logged.

Unstuck

• Stuck in a rock or a wall? Type /unstuck (or use Unstuck in the Esc menu). After 10 seconds standing still you return to the nearest Lamp-stone you have attuned (in a dungeon: its last checkpoint). Moving, taking damage or fighting cancels it. Once every 15 minutes.
• A moderator can also send you there if you are truly stuck.

Powder and Shot

• New quest: Powder and Shot. Dunstan Pike in Wickhaven lends you a bronze flintlock and sends you to the alchemy table in Silverford to learn the gunner's craft: char a log, grind bone meal, make thunderpowder and twist your own stone-shot cartridges. Rewards include 60 bronze cartridges.
• Pistols from day one: Warden Isolde's Precision kit now includes a bronze flintlock and 30 cartridges alongside the shortbow.
• Wren and Pike now point you to Pike's guns, and running out of cartridges tells you where to get more.

Interface

• Easier-to-read titles: player titles and the role line under townsfolk's names have a solid outline, so they stay readable on snow, sand and bright sky. Townsfolk roles now use small capitals.
• Players standing on top of each other: right-clicking them now asks which one you mean first.
• The thank-you after a bug report or feedback no longer sends you to Discord.

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What's new at a glance

• Eight new weapons: the flail and halberd (Guard), the flintlock pistol and blunderbuss pistol (Precision), the sceptre and runeblade (Arcana), and the censer and prayer bell (Restoration). Every one comes in all seven tiers, bronze to aether, with +1 to +3 upgrades.
• Every weapon has a trait: one rule that makes it play differently, written on its tooltip with what it is Good against. If it is not on the tooltip, it does not exist.
• Every weapon has a kit: four abilities of its own, learned in its skill at levels 8, 22, 42 and 70 (a Tool, an Engine, an Answer and a Signature), on top of the skill's shared abilities. Eighty-five kit abilities in all.
• Armour for every skill: Warhide for Might and Vestments for Restoration join plate, leather and cloth.
• Leatherworking, a new artisan skill, with a tanning rack and a leatherworker's bench.
• XP follows the weapon: every hit trains the skill of the weapon that made it.
• Monster tags: some creatures are bloodless or armoured, and some weapons answer them better than others.
• One hotbar per weapon, a short primer the first time you pick up a new kind, and Spellbook tabs per weapon.
• The Wickhaven training yard: five trainers, one per combat skill, and a training dummy.

Might

Warhide armour. Every melee weapon's hits train Might.

Sword, trait Counter-edge: your first hit soon after a parry, or after a dodge that slips a blow, hits much harder. Good against duels and bosses that telegraph.

• Feint (8): show an opening for a second; the first blow that comes at you is parried and answered.
• Crosscut (22): two crossing cuts in a wide arc that leave foes Exposed, so their next hit from anyone lands harder.
• Blade Ward (42): hold the blade across your body for 2 seconds; blows from the front lose most of their force and arrows are parried.
• Duelist's Flourish (70): dash through your foe with five quick cuts, stronger for every parry you made in the last 10 seconds.

Axe, trait Hew: the last hit of your combo opens a bleed on a foe that is not already bleeding. Good against beasts and people (not the bloodless).

• Gash (8): a ripping backhand that opens another bleed on everything in front of you, and hits harder for each bleed already there.
• Bloodletting (22): rake everything around you and burst every bleed for extra damage; part of the burst heals you.
• Hatchet Toss (42): hurl your axe to interrupt a cast or wind-up and slow the foe; it comes back to your hand a second later.
• Reaver's Frenzy (70): for 10 seconds every tick of your bleeds speeds up your attacks.

Mace, trait Crush: ignores part of the foe's armour and the armoured tag; the last hit of your combo staggers. Good against skeletons and the armoured.

• Skullcrack (8): a heavy blow that Dazes (slower attacks); a little more damage on the armoured.
• Shatter Armour (22): Sundered Armour on everything in front of you: a quarter less armour against the whole party.
• Ground Pound (42): pound the ground and knock smaller foes off their feet.
• Bonebreaker (70): hold to wind up, release for a blow that ignores all armour; a full wind-up stuns.

Dagger, trait Backstab: much better critical chance from behind. Good against anything a tank is holding.

• Shadowstep (8): step through the shadows to just behind a foe; your next hit is a critical hit.
• Venom Edge (22): coat the blade so every hit poisons; poison works on the bloodless.
• Smoke Bomb (42): halve every foe's interest in you and blind those close by.
• Assassinate (70): a killing thrust, four times as strong from behind or on a foe under 30% health; a kill readies it again.

Spear, trait Brace: more damage to a foe rushing or lunging at you, and your thrusts strike the first three foes in line. Good against packs and rushers.

• Impale (8): drive the spear through a line of foes and root them.
• Set Spear (22): plant the spear; the first foe to come close takes a heavy blow and is stopped.
• Vault (42): pole-vault over a foe and sweep everything around you as you land.
• Dragon's Reach (70): three thrusts down a long line, each striking everything in it.

Greatsword, trait Sweep: the last hit of your combo staggers foes below your level. Good against crowds.

• Leaping Cleave (8): leap to a spot and cleave a wide arc as you land.
• Momentum (22): basic hits build Momentum; spend it all in a full circle around you.
• Blade Wall (42): raise the flat of the blade for 2 seconds and throw part of what it stops back at the striker.
• Titan's Swing (70): hold to wind up, release a huge sweep around you that hurls smaller foes back; a full wind-up breaks casts.

Guard

Plate armour. Flail and halberd hits, guarded strikes and shield punches all train Guard, and Guard weapons draw threat.

Shield, trait Bulwark: raise it to block a flat amount and a share of the rest; you can strike with it up. Round, kite and tower shields now carry threat (more for bigger shields).

• Shield Bash (6): smash a foe and stun it.
• Shield Throw (22): hurl your shield; it ricochets to two more foes and taunts everything it strikes.
• Phalanx Cover (42): for 8 seconds party members behind you take less damage from the front, and your shield stays up.
• Aegis (70): for 6 seconds your guard covers you all round without draining, and blocks hits on allies close to you.

Flail (new, one-handed), trait Ironchain: every swing strikes everything in a wide arc, draws extra threat and ignores the armoured tag; the last hit of the combo dazes. Flail and shield is the classic tank.

• Chain Lash (8): lash the chain out, drag foes toward you and taunt them.
• Scourge (22): whirl the flail around you, dazing every foe it strikes with double threat.
• Wrapping Chain (42): tether foes so they cannot get far from you for 6 seconds.
• Morning Star Storm (70): a 4 second spin that strikes and taunts everything around you every second while you take less damage.

Halberd (new, two-handed), trait Polearm Guard: your guard stops melee like a kite shield (not arrows), with long reach; the sweep at the end of your combo ignores the armoured tag and draws threat. The two-handed tank.

• Hook (8): hook foes in a line, drag them in, slow and taunt them.
• Sweep the Legs (22): a low sweep that knocks small foes down and makes everything struck notice you.
• Pike Wall (42): plant the pike for 4 seconds; melee blows from the front lose most of their force, like a tower shield.
• Line in the Sand (70): score a line across your front; every foe that crosses it is slowed and taunted.

Precision

Leather armour. Bows, crossbows and both pistols train Precision.

• Shortbow, trait Quickdraw: drawing slows you least. Good against mobile fights.
• Longbow, trait Longshot: more damage the farther the arrow flies past 15 m. Good against opening shots and bosses that stand still.

Shortbows and longbows share the bow kit:

• Feathered Step (8): skip along your aim; your next shot has no draw slow.
• Charged Draw (22): hold to draw up to three times the damage; a full draw pierces foes more than 15 m away.
• Arrow Rain (42): a storm of arrows on a distant circle that hits and slows everything under it.
• Windrunner (70): for 10 seconds every shot looses two arrows and drawing does not slow you.

Crossbow, trait Punch: bolts ignore part of the foe's armour and the armoured tag. Good against the armoured.

• Heavy Bolt (8): a heavy bolt that knocks a small foe back; a little more damage on the armoured.
• Brace and Reload (22): kneel behind the stock for more damage and faster shots, but you cannot move.
• Trap Bolt (42): the bolt plants a snare that roots the first foe to step on it.
• Siege Bolt (70): hold to wind, then loose a bolt that pierces a long line and strips wards, shells and buffs.

Flintlock pistol (new, one-handed), trait Point Blank: one heavy shot, harder up close, that ignores the armoured tag and staggers small foes, then a reload. Good against the armoured and close duels.

• Pistol Whip (8): crack foes with the butt to daze them, and your pistol is reloaded.
• Double Charge (22): ram in a second charge; your next shot hits much harder and knocks the target back.
• Disarming Shot (42): a snap shot that interrupts a cast and weakens the foe's blows.
• Deadeye Focus (70): for 2 seconds every shot is a critical hit, flies true and reloads at once.

Blunderbuss pistol (new, one-handed), trait Scattershot: a blast that strikes everything in a short cone, full damage up close, throwing near foes back, then a reload. Good against packs and rushers up close.

• Kickback (8): fire a blast and ride the recoil backward out of trouble.
• Shrapnel (22): load jagged shot; pellets lodge in foes and your next blast sets them off.
• Flash Powder (42): blind everything in a cone and break their casts.
• Dragon's Breath (70): a burning cone that sets everything alight and leaves the ground on fire.

Guns fire cartridges and must reload after every shot; rolling mid-reload spills the powder and the reload starts over. Stone-shot cartridges are cheap to make anywhere with a knife; metal cartridges (shot from the anvil and thunderpowder from the alchemy table, packed at the fletching bench) hit harder. A powder horn in the off hand saves cartridges the way a quiver saves arrows. Orsa Flintmantle, the gunsmith of Dunmar Hold, sells the lot.

Arcana

Cloth armour, now spell power only. Staves, wands, sceptres and runeblades train Arcana.

Staff, trait Amplify: your area spells cover more ground. Good against packs.

• Attunement (8): tune your bolts to fire, frost or storm so they burn, chill or shock.
• Ley Line (22): draw a ley line on the ground; your spells hit foes standing on it harder.
• Arcane Barrage (36), Meteor (50) and Starfall (78) stay the staff's own spells.

Wand, trait Volley: the last bolt of your combo splits to a second foe. Good against many weak foes.

• Magic Missiles (8): three seeking sparks in a fan.
• Hex (22): the foe takes more magic damage from everyone.
• Mirror Step (42): blink away and leave a mirror image that holds your foes' attention.
• Spellstorm (70): for 6 seconds your bolts fly faster and leap from foe to foe.

Sceptre (new, one-handed), trait Detonate: a slow, heavy orb that splashes around its target and sets off burning, chill or shock for a big bonus. Good against combos with staff users and your own damage over time.

• Static Field (8): charge the ground so the foes in it are shocked, and shocked again.
• Overload (22): your next orb sets off every mark on every foe around where it bursts.
• Rune Mine (42): a rune that blasts and shocks the first foe to step on it.
• Sunder the Veil (70): tear every burn, chill and shock off every foe around you for heavy damage.

Runeblade (new, one-handed), trait Siphon: magic cuts at sword reach that use your spell power and restore focus with every hit. The battlemage's blade, at home in Warhide or plate.

• Blink Strike (8): blink forward, cutting every foe on the way.
• Spellcut (22): a wide rune-lit cut that leaves your blade's element on the foes it hits.
• Runic Parry (42): a short rune guard that turns what it stops into focus.
• Thousand Runes (70): for 6 seconds every swing also looses a rune bolt down your aim.

Restoration

Vestments armour. Tomes, reliquaries, censers and prayer bells train Restoration, even when their bolts hit a foe.

Tome, trait Scripture: your heal pulse heals much more on an ally who is badly hurt. Good for spot healing.

• Bookmark (8): mark an ally; your next three pulses also heal them, wherever they land.
• Psalm (22): a short channelled heal that grows with every verse.
• Rewrite (42): lift an ailment off an ally and write it onto a foe.
• Gospel (70): every badly hurt ally near you is healed to full.

Reliquary, trait Lantern: your pulse also heals allies standing near the one it lands on. Good for group healing.

• Lantern Sweep, Lamplight Vigil and Beacon of the Reliquary stay its own abilities.
• Lantern of the Lost (70, new): for 8 seconds an ally near you who takes a killing blow is left standing and healed instead (once a minute per ally).

Censer (new, one-handed), trait Incense: your pulse lobs a cloud that clings to the ally it lands on, or settles on the ground, and heals everyone inside. Good for area healing in melee groups.

• Thurible Swing (8): swing the censer through the foes in front of you and heal yourself a little.
• Smoke Screen (22): a cloud of smoke; allies inside take less from arrows and other ranged blows.
• Fumigate (42): a bitter cloud that lifts poison and bleeding from allies and dazes foes.
• Holy Fog (70): for 10 seconds a large healing fog follows you.

Prayer bell (new, one-handed), trait Toll: your pulse wards the ally against damage instead of healing, and every fourth toll lifts an ailment. Good for damage prevention and raid pulses.

• Peal (8): ward every ally around you.
• Resonance (22): set a small bell ringing that wards nearby allies every 2 seconds.
• Knell (42): lift every ailment from allies around you and break the casts of foes nearby.
• Sanctuary Bell (70): for 5 seconds no ally near you can lose more than a fifth of their health to one blow.

Warhide

• New armour for Might: skullhelm (horned warhelm from tier 4), warharness, warkilt, bracers, stompers and a fur mantle, in all seven tiers from leather to aetherhide. Studded hide, fur and bone that grows wilder every tier, with war paint that glows at the top.
• It raises melee power, with some critical chance and health, so a fighter who does not tank finally has armour of their own.
• Made by Leatherworking from cured leather, a trophy from the beasts that give the hide (bones, boar tusks, wolf fangs, bear claws, ogre tusks, wyrm horns, aether talons) and, for the harness and kilt, a metal bar for the studs.
• Shops sell tier 1. Two unique dungeon sets (Hollowden and Snowmane), single pieces from world bosses and rare beasts, and the Russetback set from Russetwood. Some uniques raise a weapon trait by a rank while you wear them.

Vestments

• New armour for Restoration: cowl, surplice, cassock, vestment gloves, sandals and stole, in every cloth tier from linen to aetherweave. A long surplice over a cassock with a stole, gilt thread, a halo and drifting motes of light at the top tiers.
• It raises healing power, focus and focus regeneration, with a little health.
• Made by Tailoring at the sewing table from cloth bolts and a relic dropped by the undead, spirits and cultists: tallow candles, prayer beads, saints' knucklebones, blessed ash, gilded icons, wisplight motes and halo shards. Healers now hunt different foes from fighters.
• Shops sell tier 1. Two unique dungeon sets (the Ringer's and the Vigil), single pieces from bosses and rares, and the Barrowlight set from the Hollow Barrow.

Leatherworking and the stations

• Leatherworking is a new artisan skill, the twentieth. Cure hides on a tanning rack, then work the leather at a leatherworker's bench into Warhide, leather armour, spaulders, quivers, powder horns, packs and the regional leather sets, and upgrade them to +3.
• Both stations stand beside the sewing tables in town. Edda Saddler, the Wickhaven leatherworker, sells hides, leather and tier-1 leather gear, and her quest The Tanner's Trade teaches the craft.
• Tailoring keeps the loom and sewing table: weaving, cloth armour, mantles, Vestments and tomes.
• At 99: the Leatherworker's Cape of Hard Seasons.

XP follows the weapon

• A basic attack trains the skill of the weapon that made it: a flail or halberd trains Guard, a tome or bell trains Restoration, a runeblade trains Arcana.
• An ability trains its own skill, so Arcane Spark cast from a tome still trains Arcana.
• Bleeds, burns and poisons train the skill of the hit that caused them. Vitality still takes its third of everything.

Guard and threat

• Swings made with a shield raised (guarded strikes) and shield punches now train Guard, as do flail and halberd hits, on top of blocking, parries, stances and taunts.
• A taunt pays Guard XP when it takes a creature off someone else.
• Shields, flails and halberds carry threat, so creatures stay on the one holding them. Bigger shields hold more; all threat bonuses together are capped.

Monster tags

• Bloodless creatures (skeletons, revenants, ghosts and spirits, golems, wisps, elementals, slimes, the dry dead) cannot bleed. Poison and everything else still work.
• Armoured creatures (crabs and shelled crawlers, golems, knights and soldiers in plate or mail, scarabs and scorpions) shrug off part of every physical blow. Maces, crossbows, flintlock pistols and flails ignore the tag, as does the halberd's finishing sweep; magic is never affected.
• A creature's examine text and target frame say which tags it has, and every weapon's primer and Codex page shows how it fares against them.

One hotbar per weapon, and the primer

• Each weapon keeps its own hotbar (a flail with a shield is a different bar from a flail alone). Swap weapons and the bar swaps with them.
• The first time you take up a weapon, its bar fills itself: its kit first, then the skill's shared abilities. Change it as you like in the Spellbook.
• The Spellbook has a tab per skill, then per weapon, then Shared, with each weapon's trait and Good against at the top and locked kit abilities shown with their level.
• An ability you unlock while holding something else goes onto the right weapon's bar: "New for your axe: Bloodletting".
• The first time you equip a new kind of weapon, a short primer card (never mid-fight) shows its trait, Good against and kit. Try it marks the training dummy or the nearest weak foe; Open Spellbook jumps to that weapon. The first time you use a kit ability, a one-line tip names its role.
• The Codex has a new Weapons tab with a page per combat skill.
• Settings: Don't show weapon tips turns the primer off.

The new-player path

• New arrivals get a set of tier-1 Warhide from Corin's arms chest with their first weapon.
• At the end of chapter 1 Warden Isolde offers one full kit per skill, each with matching armour: a sword and the last of the Warhide; a shortbow, arrows and leathers; an apprentice staff and cloth; a novice tome, a focus and linen Vestments; or a bronze flail, round shield and bronze plate. Each names the trainer who teaches the rest.
• The Wickhaven training yard, just up the Lamp Road from the quay, has five trainers and training dummies that swing slowly, never fall and pay no XP: the place to practise blocks and rotations.
• Might, Gunnhild Stoutarm (Edge and Blood): bleed a penned boar with a battleaxe, watch a bloodless skeleton refuse the bleed, then break it with a mace.
• Guard, Sergeant Aldous Crane (Hold the Yard): block the dummy's swings with a flail and round shield, land guarded strikes, and Provoke the yard goblin off Ned the bread man.
• Precision, Wren Hatchley (Past Fifteen Paces): hit a target from past 15 m with a longbow, then stagger a charging boar up close with a flintlock.
• Arcana, Magister Ottoline Quaile (Spark and Fuse): set a slime burning with a staff, then detonate it with a sceptre's orb.
• Restoration, Sister Elowen Liddell (Bind and Bell): heal the wounded guard with a tome, then ward him with a prayer bell before the dummy's swing lands. She sends you on to Sister Aldeth's Healer's Oath.
• Each trainer lends you the weapons (you keep them) and the trial pays enough XP to unlock that weapon's second ability.

What happens to existing characters

• Nothing is lost. Every item, level and quest stays where it was.
• Healers' worn cloth becomes Vestments, once. If your Restoration is at least your Arcana, each base cloth piece you are wearing is swapped for the Vestment of the same tier and quality in the same slot (robe to surplice, hood to cowl, skirt to cassock, gloves to vestment gloves, shoes to sandals, mantle to stole), as long as your Restoration is high enough to wear it. Your satchel and bank are never touched. Mages keep their cloth.
• Cloth now raises spell power only. Cloth uniques, regional cloth sets, dungeon cloth and the enchanted robes keep the stats they had.
• Tailoring and Leatherworking. Leatherworking starts at level 1 for everyone. Your Tailoring level and XP are untouched. Making leather armour, Warhide, quivers, powder horns and packs, and curing hides, now trains Leatherworking at the new stations; Tailoring keeps cloth, Vestments and tomes. Leather gear you own is still worn on Precision, as before.
• Hotbars. Your current bar is kept as the bar of the weapon you are holding. Other weapons build their own bar the first time you take them up. You get a one-time card explaining weapon bars, and no primer for weapons you have already used.
• XP. A tome's or reliquary's bolt on a foe now trains Restoration instead of Arcana, and guarded strikes and shield punches train Guard instead of Might.

Sound

• Wind and other background sounds are much quieter by default.
• The Audio settings tab now has Master volume, Ambient volume and Mute all. Ambient volume controls the wind, birds, waves and town bustle, which the Music and Effects sliders never touched.
• Footsteps no longer keep playing while you're in the air.

Balance

• Greatswords hit lighter: a greatsword now lands about a quarter harder than a one-handed weapon, so sword and board stays worthwhile.
• Battleaxes hit a little lighter on each blow, with the rest of their strength in the bleeds Hew and the axe kit open. Hew's bleed lasts 1.5 seconds, Gash opens one bleed, and Bloodletting rakes hard but bursts each bleed for a modest amount. Against bloodless foes an axe loses about 12% of its damage.
• Maces hit slightly harder, and Skullcrack does a little more (+10%) to armoured foes.
• Armoured foes shrug off 15% of blows from blades.
• Staves and wands deal 45% more damage, and the new sceptre and runeblade are tuned to match.
• The skill's shared shots hit lighter from longbows, crossbows and pistols, which out-damaged the shortbow with them. Heavy Bolt does a little more (+10%) to armoured foes.
• Guard XP: the Guard abilities you already had give the same Guard XP per use as before. The new flail, halberd and shield kit abilities train Guard through the blows they land, block and taunt, not per use. Flail and halberd swings, shield punches and guarded strikes train Guard a little slower per hit than other weapons train their skill, because blocking trains Guard too.
• Abilities scale with their own skill: Arcane Spark cast with a tome in hand scales with Arcana.
• Leatherworking recipes give 50% more XP than the same recipes gave Tailoring.
• Cloth armour now raises spell power only; healing power moved to Vestments.

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• The hiscores are on the website at whisperedscrolls.com/hiscores: total level and every skill, the same boards as the in-game Hiscores window. Pick a skill from the list, see the top three on a podium, show up to the top 200 and search for a name. Each board has its own link you can share.
• The website has a fresh look: a screenshot gallery you can click through, the latest patch notes up front and a clearer path to playing or downloading the Windows app.

Open alpha

• Whispered Scrolls is in open alpha, and the game now says so: an Open Alpha badge on the logo, a note on the title and sign-in screens with a link to the Discord, and a small build tag in the corner of the HUD. Hiding the interface hides the tag too.

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• Delver's Marks are no longer cleared when you finish Down the Cellar Steps or use "Clear finished quest items". They are money for the Delvers' Quartermaster in Lampwatch, so they stay in your bag.

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• Starting another pick or fishing cast straight after one finishes no longer carries the finished pose into the new swing.

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• Each quest now shows its requirements (recommended level, quests to finish first, skill levels), with a tick or cross for what you already meet.
• It also shows where to take the quest and where to hand it in, with the NPC's name and place.

Bronze

• Copper bars and copper gear are now called bronze: bronze bars, daggers, swords, shields, armour, arrows, tools and bands. Copper ore and copper rocks keep their names.

Interface

• Resized windows cut long titles and the "Stay open for action cam" label short with an ellipsis, so they no longer push the header's buttons out of place.

World

• Mother Mildew's entrance in the Hollow Hill is open again: a rock strip beside the Vat Steps no longer blocks the ramp.

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• Each window has a Stay open for action cam box in its header, shown when the action camera is on. Tick it and the window stays up while you look around. The first click in the world starts looking around again.
• The box has a tooltip.

Combat

• "In combat" only shows when something is actually fighting you. Swinging at nothing, guarding, dodging and your own spells no longer show it.

Interface

• UI scale now scales the whole interface: windows, HUD, chat and minimap. It applies when you let go of the slider.
• A Feedback / Report a bug button sits in the bottom-right corner.
• Opening a shop also opens your inventory.
• Bank: hovering over a full bank is smoother, and an item you drop lands in the slot you chose. Quick-stack is still there.
• World map: smoother, and the map art shows its inked coastline again.
• Crafting: "Can make" follows your skill level, and "Have materials" narrows it to what you are carrying. The cast bar shows seconds left for gathering and crafting.
• Skills, Unlocks: hover "and N more" to see them all.
• Movement keys work while a checkbox or slider has focus.
• Forging a few early pieces now needs the same smithing level as smelting their bar.

Quests and world

• Catch of the Day: the tracker shows your fish counts, and ticks off once you hand them in.
• A jeweler's bench in Hearthmoor.
• A cooking range at Gull's Rest.
• Two more marsh fishing spots in Saltmire.

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• Monsters wade too. Crocs and the other land monsters now walk through shallow water, as deep as you can wade. Deep water is still out of bounds for them.

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• The Reliquary. A new two-handed healing weapon for Restoration: a curved scythe with a lantern that heals the ally on your aim line and lights up the party near them. Seven tiers, one per wood. The first tier is sold at the General Store, and the rest are made at the fletching bench. New Restoration abilities unlock at levels 8, 26 and 48.

Changed

• Wands cast Arcana. A wand is now a one-handed damage weapon and fires a bolt.
• Tomes heal. A tome is now a one-handed healing weapon, and it takes the heal-pulse attack that wands used to have.
• Staff healers get a tome. Once, at login, a staff healer is given a tome. Nothing you own is taken away.
• Tomes sit in your main hand. Like a wand, a tome is held in the right hand, so a shield, a focus or a lantern can go in the other hand. The tome rests on your right hip when sheathed.
• Reliquary and tome look. The Reliquary's lamp glows softly at the tip without lighting the ground around you.

Added

• Alpha Pioneer title. Everyone who played during the open alpha can wear the Alpha Pioneer title.

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• Shop services. Smiths, miners, cooks, fishmongers, apothecaries, fletchers, tailors, the woodsman and the market halls' pack-stitchers will now make things for you. Open their shop and pick the new Services tab, bring the materials, pay a fee and get the item at once. You earn no experience and it does not count as crafting for quests, but you need no skill level or tool, and nothing ever burns.
• Fees grow with tier. At starter tier the fee is a few coins. From iron up it climbs steeply, so a player crafter is usually the cheaper choice for better gear.
• The Lampwarden kit can be made. Smiths can trim steel plate, a steel shield or a steel mace with copper and lamp oil into the matching Lampwarden piece, and jewellers can assemble the Lampwarden Lantern. The Quiet Lamp quartermasters at the Hollow Barrow camp and in Lampwatch do the refit as a service. The Lampwarden mantle is back on their shelves.

Changed

• Shops show the real sell price. The Sell tab now shows exactly what the shopkeeper pays, including a shop's better rate for the goods it wants, and marks what it will not buy as "Not interested".
• Remote shops pay more for what they need. Frontier and specialist shops pay a premium for some goods (Dhurrun's Cut for ore and bars, the Lampwatch Quartermaster for arms, armour and potions, and more). The shop window's footer lists each premium.
• Regional capes are back in their shops, at a premium price.
• Lampwarden gear is worth less to shops, now that it can be made.

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• Arrows, bolts and spells go where your crosshair is. With no monster under the crosshair, a shot now flies into the spot the crosshair rests on. Aim at the ground and it lands there, instead of sailing over it at chest height.
• Arrows and bolts land. A shot aimed at the ground stops where it hits the ground rather than flying on underneath it.

Added

• Your ammo shows beside the crosshair. With a bow or crossbow, the count of the ammunition you have equipped sits at the crosshair's bottom right, with its icon. It turns red when you have none.

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• The Brine Cellars is a real delve. Its monsters have more health and hit harder than out in the world, the smuggler is dangerous, and Old Barrelback is a proper fight. It's made for two or three players with food. A lone player with food can still win.
• Corin Vale's "Down the Cellar Steps" opens after Catch of the Day and Tools of the Trade. He tells you plainly to bring food and a friend.
• Every clear pays a reward. Each player who fought Old Barrelback gets a Barrelback Buckler or a Cellar Lamp Wand, every time.
• The Brine Cellars no longer promises an end chest. The party card shows what a clear actually pays.

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• The Brine Cellars now challenges a fresh player. Its enemies hit about twice as hard and have about twice the health they had before. The elites and Old Barrelback are where the fight is. A lone player can still clear it, but it takes real work.

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• The Brine Cellars, Hollow Hill Warrens and Knoll Delvings have new layouts. The Brine Cellars descends from a salt cellar into the sea. Hollow Hill is a set of winding burrows that breaks into an old Order cellar. Knoll Delvings is a mine that drops into a barrow and climbs to a furnace.
• Each delve changes light, fog and air as you move between its parts.
• Old Barrelback lives in an oil cask. He rears up when his belly is open. The sea floods his cave as the fight goes on.
• Gobbo Smeltmaw's bellows glow while he overheats, and the stagger bar now fills and shows the break.
• Winch plates light up as players stand on them. Ore carts and pillars give cover from Rattlejaw's volley.
• Every delve has its own music, and each boss fight gets action music that speeds up and builds with each phase. The other dungeons now use the music of their nearest theme until they get their own.

Fixed

• Lamplit pillars visibly break.
• Snagtooth's last phase is named.
• The twin tether no longer flickers.
• Fireflies no longer drift through dungeons.

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• A starter dungeon: The Brine Cellars. A short delve for levels 4 to 8, just west of the Wickhaven quay, with one boss, Old Barrelback. Corin's new quest, Down the Cellar Steps, walks you through it: opening the party card, readying up, looting and earning Delver's Marks. The first clear on each difficulty pays Marks from the end chest.
• Two new abilities. Pinning Shot (Precision 36) is an aimed bow or crossbow shot that pins the target in place for 2 seconds. Riposte (Guard 45) readies a parry: the next hit you could block from the front becomes a perfect block. No combat style now waits more than 8 levels for a new ability up to level 50.
• Metal arrows and bolts hit harder. Copper ammo adds 12% to your basic shot, rising to 20% for aether. Wooden arrows add nothing.
• Quivers save arrows. A quiver gives your basic shots a 15% to 30% chance not to use up the arrow or bolt. Tooltips show both bonuses.
• Map pins get icons, colours and labels. Edit a pin from the world map card and it shows its icon on the map and minimap. Pins are saved with your character, so they follow you to any device or browser; pins already in your browser are moved over once. You can share a pin in chat; other players click it to copy it to their own map.
• Flood water you can see. In Silverrun Sluices, Lockjaw's lock now visibly floods and the sluice-gate arena fills under High Water, then drains when the gate breaks.

Changed

• Staves are for Arcana, wands and tomes for Restoration. Healing spells no longer work with a staff, so a mage no longer heals as well as a healer. Arcane Spark still works on every casting weapon. Staves no longer add healing power (dungeon staves give more focus instead), and the Bog Mother's healer weapon is now a wand. If you heal with a staff, you get a free wand suited to your Restoration level the first time you log in.
• Frost Nova freezes. It now freezes enemies for 2.5 seconds, rooting them and making them take 10% more damage, instead of chilling them for 4 seconds.
• Smaller groups can work the pressure plates. Plates now ask only for the party members inside the dungeon, so groups of fewer than four can balance the Great Scales and other plate puzzles.
• Area spells and piercing shots share experience. Damage-over-time spells cast on a crowd and arrows that pierce through several enemies pay experience the same way other area attacks do, and Guard experience from blocking much lower-level enemies is reduced.
• A clearer see-through view. When walls, trees or props hide your character, the see-through cutout is now shaped like your character, larger and softer, and tables or benches right beside you no longer flicker.
• Riposte beats a broken shield. Riposte is the one parry that still works while a broken shield or empty guard bar keeps your guard down. Its 18 second cooldown is the limit.
• Corin's arms chest no longer promises a staff that heals. Healing is the wand and tome's job.
• The Brine Cellars card shows the end-chest Marks status for the difficulty you pick, and Down the Cellar Steps says when Marks are paid.
• Item tooltips explain kept gear. A requirement you meet only because your gear level was kept from before the experience change now says so.

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• Withdrawing potions works again. Taking more than 3 health or stamina potions out of the bank said your satchel was full and gave you only 3. You now get as many as you ask for, three to a slot. Redeeming a potion writ and offering more than 3 potions in a trade work too.
• Chat stays on the newest message. After a long session, new messages (including your own) could end up hidden below the bottom of the chat window.
• The loot window's resize corner is easier to find. It is now gold on the dark window, and the Take all button no longer covers it.
• Battle recap numbers are readable. Damage, healing and damage-taken numbers were cut off in their bars.
• The frame rate limit holds in the desktop app. A 144 fps limit could run at about 155, and 60 at about 65. It now sticks to the limit you choose.

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• Link items in chat. Shift-click an item in your satchel, bank, gear, loot, shop, market or crafting window to drop its name into chat. Other players can hover the link to see the item, or click it to keep the tooltip open. Ctrl+shift-click still selects a range in the satchel and withdraws everything from a bank slot. While you are running, shift-click still uses the item as before.

Fixed

• Captain Silt Varrow's powder kegs now appear. The three kegs were never shown, so the sluice gate could not be broken. They now glow on the floor and can be picked up and thrown. The same fix brings back the hidden objects in the Sunken Belfry and Greystope.
• Lockjaw can be fought. Every hit on him said Immune: he turned to face whoever hurt him, so nobody could stay behind him. Hits on his shell now glance off for reduced damage instead, still draw his attention so a tank can hold him, and his back takes full damage.

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• Anti-aliasing setting. Settings > Graphics now lets you choose how jagged edges are smoothed: Off, FXAA, SMAA, MSAA 2x or MSAA 4x. Low uses FXAA by default, which is much lighter on older laptops. Medium and High look the same as before.
• Copy diagnostics. A button in Settings > Graphics and the /diag chat command copy a short report on your PC and how the game is running, ready to paste into a bug report. Bug reports sent from the game include it automatically.
• Detailed FPS meter. The FPS meter key now cycles off, small and detailed. The detailed view adds a frame-time graph. You can also turn it on in Settings > Interface.

Changed

• A clearer quality preset row. Settings shows Auto, Low, Medium and High as separate buttons with exactly one selected, and a note underneath says what Auto detected and which preset it is using. Option buttons in the Graphics settings are no longer cut off, and rows with five choices fit on one line.
• Fewer hitches around crowds. When you arrive somewhere busy, creatures and mounts appear over a few frames, nearest first, instead of all at once. Bandits and cultists are much cheaper to show; their outfits no longer vary slightly in colour from one to the next.
• Smoother gathering. Felling a tree, mining a rock or picking a herb no longer causes a small stutter, and standing still in towns and forests costs less.
• Character windows open without a pause. Equipment, Inspect and NPC conversations reuse one character view instead of setting up a new one every time. The turntable turns at 30 fps, and the conversation portrait holds still after a moment.
• Item icons fill in without freezing the bank, vendor and loot windows, and are remembered between sessions.
• Smoother exploring. The fog of war on the map and minimap now updates only around newly explored ground, and the world map paints in gradually instead of in one long pause.

Fixed

• Night-time lamp shadows of trees and buildings are now drawn correctly.

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• See how many adventurers are online. Type /players (or /online) in chat for the count, and you'll see it when you log in too.

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• A rock for every gem. Moonstone, Jade, Tidestone, Sunstone, Emberstone, Skystone and Starstone each have their own rock now. You can mine each one at the same level you need to cut it and use it, starting with Moonstone at Mining 1. Gem rocks take much longer to come back than ore, so stones stay precious.
• Early gems close to home. Moonstone rocks dot the starter coast and the low country, Jade grows in the hills around Hearthmoor, and Tidestone sits by the lakes and marshes.
• Jade and Tidestone in shops. The Hearthmoor General Store, the Stonebrook and Dunmar miners' shops and Lakehearth Landing keep a few in stock, at a premium.

Changed

• Staves, wands and tomes are much easier to make. Every gem is now cut at its gear tier's level (Jade at 10, Tidestone at 20, Sunstone at 30, Emberstone at 40, Skystone at 55, Starstone at 75), so the gem is ready as soon as you can carve the staff.
• The first staff, wand and tome need no gem. They use whisper dust from the General Store instead.
• Ore rocks turn up stray gems twice as often.
• The old mixed Gem Rocks are gone. In their place you will find Sunstone and Emberstone rocks, and in Hollow Barrow mostly adamant, mithril and coal.

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• Graphics are picked for your PC. On first launch the game checks your graphics chip and chooses Low, Medium or High for you. Settings shows Auto with what it detected, and you can still pick a preset yourself. If you were on High and your PC looks better suited to a lower preset, the game offers to switch once.
• FPS meter. Press F7 (or turn it on in Settings > Interface) to see your frame rate and the 1% low in the corner of the screen.
• Frame rate limit. Settings > Graphics can cap the frame rate at 30, 60, 120 or 144 fps. New players start at 60, which keeps laptops cooler and quieter. Existing players stay uncapped until they choose a limit.
• A clear message when your browser can't run the game, with steps to fix it, instead of a crash when entering the world.

Changed

• Graphics are prepared on the loading screen. The loading screen now stays up until the game has finished preparing its graphics, so you are not clicking a world that is not ready yet, and spells, effects, buildings and dungeons no longer stutter the first time you see them.
• Fewer hitches. Changing the graphics preset no longer freezes the game, turning the camera through forests is smoother, and far-away or off-screen characters cost less to draw.
• Automatic quality drops stick. When the game lowers graphics because the frame rate is low, it now stays lowered instead of resetting, Settings shows it with a Restore button, and it can step back up once things run smoothly again. Picking a preset yourself always wins.
• Less work in the background. The game drops to a low frame rate while its window is hidden, minimised or in the background, saving power and heat.
• Medium shows fewer lamp lights at night to keep older PCs smooth. Turning shadows on or off and the number of lamp lights now apply after a restart.

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• Crafting xp is easier to read. The xp a recipe gives now shows in one dark colour for every skill, instead of pale skill colours that were hard to see on the parchment.

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• The home page now offers the Windows app in place of the old browser "install as an app" box, which did not work reliably in every browser. Every download link goes to the latest signed installer.

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• Whispered Scrolls for Windows. A small, signed desktop app that plays the same live game. It always uses your graphics card, needs no browser settings, keeps running smoothly when you alt-tab, and updates itself. Get it from Download for Windows on the home page or Get the Windows app in the Esc menu. Playing in the browser works exactly as before.

Changed

• The game updates itself. After an update, your game reloads onto the new version on its own when you reconnect. If a new version arrives while you play, a small banner offers a reload, and nothing interrupts you mid-fight.

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• Archers start with 150 arrows, not 1000. Wooden arrows are cheap to whittle from a log with a knife, so you can always make more.

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• Wooden arrows. Whittle a log into 10 wooden arrows with a knife, anywhere. No bench, feathers or heads needed. They are weaker than metal arrows but never run out on you.
• Basic fletching by hand. With a knife you can now saw planks, carve arrow shafts, pitch torches and carve unstrung bows away from a bench. Stringing bows and metal arrows still need the fletching bench. Early Fletching pays noticeably more XP.
• Feedback button. A speech-bubble button at the top right (and Send Feedback in the Esc menu) lets you tell us about bugs, quests, dungeons or ideas, with an optional screenshot. We read every one.
• Graphics tips. If your browser is drawing the game without your graphics card (hardware acceleration off, Edge efficiency mode, or the wrong GPU picked), the game now tells you how to fix it. Firefox players get a tip to switch to Chrome or Edge.

Changed

• Archers start with far more arrows: 1000 instead of 100.
• Learn to make arrows early. Hallie gives you a knife when you take her quest and shows you how to whittle wooden arrows.
• The Lamp-stone lesson explains travel better: what it costs, that you can travel from anywhere (cheaper beside a stone), and that stones you haven't touched stay dark.
• Your horse comes sooner. Ansel's letter now starts Hoofbeats right away, so the pony quest is on your path from the start.
• Bowstrings stack.

Fixed

• A bow or crossbow with no arrows or bolts no longer looks like it shoots. You just get the "no arrows" warning.

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• A guided first quest. New characters get a short step-by-step guide right after arriving in Wickhaven: walking, looking around, freeing the cursor, following the quest tracker, talking to people, equipping your weapon, attacking, using an ability and reading your health and focus. Each step ends when you do it, glowing rings show where to look, and an arrow points at your next goal. Skip it any time, or replay it from Tutorial in the Esc menu.
• Server announcements show in the middle of the screen as a large banner (restart warnings too), and still appear in chat.

Changed

• Bows look natural in combat. You carry the bow low with your arms swinging as you walk or run, and raise it only to shoot.
• Tidier top of the screen. Pickups, invites and tips stack in one column under the compass, clear of the target frame and the zone and quest banners.
• Chat remembers your channel. Chat stays on the last channel you picked (or typed a channel command for) until you switch, even after closing chat or logging out.
• Loot window: smaller text, and it now opens halfway between your cursor and the right edge of the screen.

Fixed

• The controls card now shows for new players who haven't started walking yet, and closing it on one character no longer hides it from your new characters.
• Boats on the character select screen float on the water instead of sinking under it.
• Height in the character creator is easy to see: the figure grows and shrinks against a fixed gauge beside it.

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• A proper arrival. The camera sweeps in over Wickhaven harbour before the Whisper speaks (press any key to skip). Story scenes play in a cinematic frame, lighting the harbour lamp makes it flare with ships answering out at sea, and the Chalk Lookout now has a lit beacon and a view of the road north.
• The Lamp Road really is lit. Creatures leave you alone while you walk it between Wickhaven, Silverford and Hearthmoor. Step well off the road, or hit something, and they still come for you.
• New abilities. Bows get Quick Shot at Precision 4. Arcana gets Arcane Spark at level 4 (staff, wand or tome) and Searing Wave at level 14. Every combat style now gets something new every few levels up to 30.
• Shoulders slot. Plate pauldrons, leather spaulders and cloth mantles in every material tier: craft them with Smithing or Tailoring, upgrade them, or find them in dungeons.
• Signposts that point the way. Crossroad signposts point down each road and name the next town, inn or landmark.
• Travel you can see. Lamp-stone travel (gold) and Home Recall (pale blue) show a column of light to everyone nearby when someone leaves or arrives.
• Ask Ansel. Not sure what's next in Wickhaven? Brother Ansel names every lesson you haven't finished.
• New tips for jumping rippling ground shapes, eating when hurt, and touching your first Lamp-stone.

Changed

• Levelling has its own pace. The first levels still come quickly, but levels from about 10 to 40 take longer, so the starter coast and the road to Hearthmoor stay worthwhile. Your XP is kept, so some skill levels will read lower than before, and gear you could already use keeps working. Everyone starts at Vitality 10, as new characters do. Abilities and recipes come back as you earn the levels again.
• Combat level is your highest combat skill (Might, Precision, Arcana, Guard or Restoration), so healers and tanks are rated like everyone else.
• Fairer XP. Hitting a huge pack at once gives less XP per monster, and monsters far below the skill you are training give less. Restoration now levels from healing real wounds from real enemies, not overhealing or topping up full health.
• Town critters run away when attacked from inside town, and hits from inside a town give no combat XP.
• Gear powers your resource. Mage and healer gear adds max focus or focus regen; warrior, guard and archer gear adds stamina. Focus refills faster out of combat, and Gear & Stats shows all four numbers.
• Heals are easier to land: the heal aim is 2.5 times wider. Damage spells are unchanged.
• Spells and arrows look much better. Ember Bolt burns with embers and smoke, frost shatters, lightning crackles and every hit flashes. Light gathers at your staff or wand as you cast, wands and tomes cast with a quick flick, and arrows thunk and kick up dust.
• Boss mechanics you can see. Barrels roll down the charge line, ore carts rattle down their rails, lobbed attacks arc through the air, pools bubble and smoulder, and a stunned boss gets stars over its head.
• Enemies aren't clones. Each wolf, crab, goblin and bandit in a pack has its own colouring, size and gear. Adders, toads, hares, rams, cougars, crocodiles, hawks, scorpions, wraiths, yetis and more get proper bodies. Archers draw before they shoot and shamans raise their staves.
• Gear tiers look different. Warm copper, dark studded iron and bright polished steel with brass trim. Weapons, shields, bows, staffs, wands and tomes change shape as they improve, and bows and staffs show their wood.
• Better faces. A proper neck, real ears, a cleaner nose and jaw, and fuller hair that sits right under helmets and hoods.
• Fountains and doors. Town fountains have tiered bowls and rippling water. Ordinary houses have plain dark doors, and buildings you can enter have a lantern on each side and a warm doormat.
• Bows just work: with arrows in your satchel, your quiver fills itself on your first shot.
• Straight into the story. Your first character goes from Begin the Story straight into the world, and Play enters directly when only one world is open.
• Calmer tips. One tip at a time when it matters: aiming and dodging in the first fight, blocking later. The controls card waits until you've walked around, and quest rewards no longer pop up as separate toasts.
• Clearer opening. Corin teaches the glint you'll actually see on the strand. Quest banners say Prologue or Chapter with a one-line summary, and keys mentioned in conversation follow your own bindings. The Letter for the Warden gives boots instead of a second cloak.

Fixed

• Short connection drops no longer send you back to the loading screen: the world stays on screen with a "Reconnecting" note. A busy or paused tab is no longer disconnected after a few seconds, and a silently dead connection reconnects by itself.
• Smoother big fights. Spell, arrow and particle effects no longer create new graphics data every shot, and very busy fights show at most 24 ground warnings (the nearest, boss attacks and dungeon mechanics are kept).
• Capes no longer cut through your backpack, and robes move out of the way of your legs.
• The character creator and loading tips now say your story starts on the Wickhaven quay, and the Wickhaven inn's sign reads The Lamp and Lobster.

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• Controls card. New characters get a short card on first login: how to free the cursor, open the game menu, satchel, map and journal, and change keys. Reopen it any time from Controls in the Esc menu. Until you first free the cursor, a small hint under the crosshair shows the key.
• A weapon on day one. Corin Vale on the Wickhaven quay now opens his arms chest when you take the crab lesson: pick a sword, a sword and shield, a shortbow or a staff. If you already did the crab lesson without one, ask Corin about the chest.
• Lights on your character. Hold a Pitch Torch in your off hand: it burns while you hold it, the next one lights when it burns down, and you take it off to put it out (not with a shield or a two-handed weapon). The Belt Lantern has its own Lantern slot on the Gear panel; press N to light it or put it out. Lights you were carrying have been moved into place for you.
• Gear on the hotbar. Drag gear onto a hotbar slot (or right-click it and choose Add to hotbar). Pressing the slot equips it; worn gear shows a green tick.
• Banks, shops and markets on the map. They show as lettered icons on the minimap and world map, with a Banks & shops layer on the world map.
• Dungeon keybinds. Y readies up (and starts the delve from the entrance card), N declines a ready check, Alt+L leaves the dungeon. Change them in Settings > Keybinds.
• Camera shoulder. The camera sits closer to centre. Settings > Gameplay has a Camera shoulder offset slider (0 = centred), and U swaps shoulders.
• Stat tooltips. Hover any stat in Gear & Stats to see what it does and what it is worth for you right now.
• Who's online. The Companions panel and the website show how many players are in the world, and you get an in-game countdown before the server restarts for an update.

Changed

• Dodge is on Q by default (X still works). Keys you rebound yourself are kept.
• Calmer first session. Fewer pop-ups at once: quest and level-up toasts no longer repeat their banners, a quest step change shows one line instead of three, a finished objective replaces its counter, and level-ups play one at a time. Tips wait for banners to finish.
• Shorter Chapter 1. Isolde's first chapter skips the chickens, logs and fletching bench Wickhaven already taught you, and teaches the Lamp-stones and fast travel instead. Corin, Hallie and Nell's lessons can be done in any order.
• Health and stamina potions stack three to a satchel slot.
• Dungeon bosses have a third less health.
• Clearer item text. Item, food and potion descriptions say what the thing is and does; region subtitles, resource examine text and buff tooltips are plainer. Bank notes are now named "Writ of <item>".
• The satchel window can be resized, and the loot window can be moved and resized and opens next to your cursor.
• The character creator's height slider spans 85% to 115%.
• NPC dialogue shows a parchment icon.

Fixed

• Big fights run more smoothly: the game no longer bogs down each time graphics quality changes (including the automatic drop in busy fights), and lowering quality mid-fight no longer causes a long freeze.
• Coming back to the game after it sat in the background no longer floods the screen with stale effects.
• The reconnect screen says "Reconnecting" instead of a misleading graphics message.
• The crafting window's amount box can be selected and typed over.
• The cursor no longer stays stuck on screen after the party leaves a finished dungeon.
• Chat scrolls back to the newest message when you click out of it.
• The boss recap window scrolls, so every row can be read.
• A dungeon item you can't use can be passed on again by whoever received it in a trade (within the same 10 minutes, to the same party).
• A Letter for the Warden no longer advances without the letter. Brother Ansel writes a fair copy if you lose it.
• "Install as app" works in Microsoft Edge, and the site explains where to find it if the button stays greyed out.

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• Abandon delve. If you are stuck in a dungeon run you no longer want, the entrance card has an Abandon delve button. You give up your place, and if you were the last one in, the delve closes right away so you can start a new one (no more 10 minute wait).

Changed

• Started alone, partied up after? If you enter a dungeon alone and then form a party, your run becomes your party's, so your friends can join you from the entrance. If they started their own run of that dungeon too, they abandon theirs first.

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• Join us on Discord. Whispered Scrolls now has a community Discord: find a group, share screenshots, trade tips, suggest ideas and talk to the developer. Open it from Join Discord in the Esc menu or from the website.
• When you send a bug report, the thank-you note points you to the Discord if you want to talk it through.

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• The wilds bite back. Open-world monsters from level 14 up have more health, hit harder, spot you from farther away and call more pack mates. The starter coast is unchanged.
• Hearthmoor is dangerous outside town. Goblin brutes, wolf alphas, bandit archers and bigger wolf and bandit packs roam its wilds.
• Dungeons are built for a party. Dungeon monsters hit harder, so at the dungeon's level you'll want a healer and a tank.
• Danger instead of level ranges. The zone banner, world map, travel list and loading screen rate each place Safe, Wild or Perilous for your level.
• Softer warnings. Everyday enemy swings, bites, arrows and bolts no longer paint shapes on the ground: watch for the glint on their weapon and move or roll then. Low sweeps you can jump kick up a dust arc. Bigger attacks still mark the ground, now see-through and fading in and out.
• Lanterns and torches are carried in your hand and follow your walk, run, combat and riding poses.

Added

• Loot window. After a fight, everything in reach is listed. Click an item to take just that, or Take all (F still takes everything).
• Lantern help. Light / Put out in the satchel's right-click menu, burn time in the tooltip, a small icon with a countdown while your light is lit, and a hint the first time you hold one.
• Skill progress on XP drops. Every XP drop shows the skill's level, a progress bar and the XP left to the next level (Settings: Skill progress on XP drops).
• Celebrate level-ups. When someone near you levels up, you see which skill and level over their head and hear their fanfare from where they stand. Every 10th level also gets a chat line so you can /cheer them.
• Boss and dungeon nameplates. Bosses show a skull and an ornate frame. Dungeon monsters get a light frame and a level colour that shows how much tougher they are.
• Dungeon entrances you can spot from afar. Every entrance now has a landmark (a cliff-faced hill, a great barrow, a mine headframe, a stone gateway, a drowned bell tower, a keep wall) with a light that glows at night. The door into the Stair That Asks now faces the Veilspire from the east, in a gatehouse.
• Capes flow while you ride and drape over the saddle instead of clipping through the horse.
• New loading screen. The camera walks you down into the lamplit village, shows where you're arriving and a real progress bar, then fades into the world.

Fixed

• Play is ready right away on character select: your last-played character is already selected, and the title screen's button appears almost at once.

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• Enter sends chat again. Pressing Enter in the chat box sends your message instead of doing nothing.

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• New logo. Whispered Scrolls has a new painted logo on the title screen, a new title on the loading and login screens, and a new wax-sealed scroll icon in your browser tab and when you install the game as an app.

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• Belt Lanterns and Pitch Torches. Nights are less dark: general stores sell lanterns (they burn Flasks of Lamp Oil, about 30 minutes per flask) and torches. Press N to light or put out your light. Neither takes a hand, and other players can see it. You can also bind three torches from one log and one flax at a fletching bench.
• A hand-drawn cursor. When you free the cursor (Alt or any window) it appears right on your reticle and changes with what it points at: talk, loot, attack, use, drag or type. If your browser drops the mouse lock, the normal cursor takes over and your next click brings the drawn one back. Turn it off or change its speed in Settings > Gameplay.
• Choose your mount. Open Gear & Stats and press "Set active" next to a mount to pick which one answers your mount key.
• Dungeon discovery. Dungeon entrances now appear on the world map once you have found them by walking near the gate.
• Quest compass markers. Each tracked quest gets its own numbered, colour-coded marker on the compass. Hover one to see its quest, and markers that line up merge with a +n badge.
• Crafting progress. The crafting window shows your skill level progress and how much XP is left to the next level.
• Chat filter. Swear words in chat are hidden with asterisks. It is on by default; switch it off in Settings > Interface. Character names with profanity or slurs are no longer allowed.

Changed

• Mounts are remodelled. They have real horse shapes, a saddle, a bridle and reins, flowing manes and tails, and a different look for each mount. Horses walk, trot, canter and gallop with their hooves planted, lean into turns and stay alive while standing still. Riders move with the saddle.
• Softer lamplight. Lamp orbs are much softer and no longer flicker. Their light spreads far across ground, roads and grass and fades in smoothly as you walk through town.
• Dungeon elites stand out. Elites show an Elite tag, and their level colour reflects how dangerous they really are.
• Boss tooltips, notes and Chronicle pages no longer spell out the counters. You work them out in the fight.
• Dungeon map tooltips show just the name, level range and what the entrance is near.
• Toasts now sit just under the zone name banner while it is showing.

Fixed

• The mouse cursor no longer disappears over the game world while a window (bank, shop, dungeon entrance) is open.
• Dungeon entrance cards, ready checks and completion banners now free the mouse so you can click them.
• Your character no longer runs off on its own after you die and respawn.

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• The bug report window works again. It opens in the middle of the screen, and the hotbar and the rest of the interface stay where they belong.
• The typing cursor in conversations now follows the text as it is written, instead of blinking where the line will end.

Changed

• Settings has one tab fewer. Action camera moved to Gameplay and Fullscreen to Graphics. The free-cursor key lives on the Keybinds tab with every other key.

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• Fullscreen option in Settings > Graphics, also on F11 (rebindable on the Keybinds tab). In Chrome and Edge, fullscreen lets Escape close menus without releasing the mouse, so mouse-look comes straight back. Hold Escape to leave fullscreen.

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• Reporting a bug no longer scrambles the screen. The game view and HUD stay full size while the report window is open.
• Settings checkboxes no longer make the list vanish. Ticking an option near the bottom of a scrolled list keeps every row in place.
• Character creation now tells you if a name is taken while you type, instead of only when you press Begin.
• Escape and the cursor behave better. Mouse-look comes back as soon as the browser allows it after Escape, the cursor stays visible anywhere on screen while a window is open, and a quick Escape tap opens the game menu reliably.
• Map pins now belong to each character. Your existing pins stay with the first character you log in with.
• Long labels in the world map legend wrap instead of spilling out of the panel.
• Flasks of Lamp Oil can be sold to general stores and the apothecary.

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• Every delve is now tuned for a full party of five and no longer gets easier for smaller groups. Clearing one short-handed is a test of skill.
• Delve monsters hit much harder and take far longer to kill. Regular packs want a tank holding them and a healer keeping everyone up. Elites, with gold "Elite" plates, need focused damage, interrupts and active healing.
• Elite adds. One boss in every delve now calls an elite helper partway through the fight. Someone has to pick it up, interrupt it, kite it or kill it first. Listen for the boss's call.
• Lamplit is harder still, with a little longer before its bosses enrage.
• Delve experience is a little better than fighting outside, and the loot is still all yours.

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• Mounts no longer have a level requirement. If you own a mount, you can ride it. The mount key always calls the fastest mount you own, and a halter given to a friend works for them right away.
• Odile Fairweather at the Reedlight Inn has new advice on how faster horses are earned.

Fixed

• Sprinting on horseback no longer trains Agility. The horse is doing the running.

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• No level requirement for delves. Anyone can now enter any delve with their party. The entrance card shows each delve's intended levels as a guide, and marks anyone below them with a warning that monsters will be at least the delve's lowest level. It never stops you going in.
• Delve monsters still match your party's average level within the delve's range, so a strong party can take a newer friend along. A character far below the monsters earns less experience from them, about what a monster ten levels above them would give, so a delve is a fun outing rather than a shortcut.
• The Sunken Belfry now needs The Keeper's Tale instead of A Bell Beneath the Lake, so it opens at the right point in the Lake Sael story.
• The Heartwood Deep, the Tidehold Deeps, the Open Window and the Stair That Asks no longer need a quest. Just find the entrance and go in.
• The Wyrm's Shard is now recommended from level 55, so the Gales story runs in order straight into The Bells of Windbell at Windbell Abbey.

Fixed

• The delve list in the previous update now gives the right place for every entrance. The Hollow Hill Warrens, for example, are south-east of Kettlewell in the Listeners' Downs, not near Fallowmere.

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How delves work

• Find an entrance at its landmark (they are on the world map's new Dungeons layer) and open the entrance card. It shows your party's roles, who can enter, Normal or Lamplit, your lockouts and your place in line if every delve is busy. Everyone answers the ready check with Y or N, or the buttons.
• Inside, the world fades to the delve's own themed halls and your minimap shows its floor plan. You can join a run in progress, respawn at the last lit checkpoint, rejoin after a disconnect, and leave with the Leave button. The tracker shows bosses down, run time, your checkpoint and plates being held.
• Telegraphs: gold circles with pips need that many players inside. A yellow ring on a player means gather on them, a violet ring means move away. Blue runes are plates to hold, dark wedges behind pillars are the only safe ground from a room-wide blast, a glowing line links two players, and numbers show an order or a stack count.
• Stagger and weak points: hit hard while a boss casts to break the cast. Weak points glow, and an aimed hit that lands in one flashes a tick round your crosshair.
• Press E next to a loose object such as a lantern or keg to pick it up.

Rewards

• Delver's Marks from every boss's daily cache (resets 00:00 UTC), the end chest, and the Delver's Bounty for your first full clear of each delve every week (Monday reset). Lamplit pays half again.
• Whisperbound Caches can hold one of that delve's uniques, and every empty cache raises your chance next time.
• Fair loot: everyone inside when a boss falls gets their own roll, healers and fallen friends included, but not anyone idle for two minutes. A unique that dropped for you can be traded to someone from that run for ten minutes.
• The Delvers' Quartermaster in Lampwatch sells the Delver's Scarf, the Delver's Wrap and each delve's uniques for Marks.

The dungeons

• The Hollow Hill Warrens (10-16). At Hollow Hill in the Listeners' Downs, south-east of Kettlewell. Goblins are hoarding three hundred years of lamp oil in an old cellar. Bosses: Snagtooth the Tunnel-Boss, Old Mother Mildew, Grumblegut and Whisk. Pet: Mildewling.
• The Knoll Delvings (13-19). In the side of the Kings' Knoll in the Ironfoot Fells, east of Stonebrook. Warcamp sappers dug into a barrow and woke its king. Bosses: Foreman Rattlejaw, the Barrow-King's Bones, Gobbo Smeltmaw.
• The Listeners' Undercroft (16-22). An old drain near the Listeners' Stones, west of Kettlewell. Needs The Lamp and the Lodge. The Hushed are drinking the Stones' hum. Bosses: the Muffled Choir, the Bellwarden, the Grey Man.
• The Mapleroot Hollows (19-25). In the Hollow of Seven Oaks in the Thornwood, north-west of Highpost. Bandits, wolves and a sapling grown far too big. Bosses: Red Hessa, Grizzlemaw, the Sap-Drinker. Pet: Hollow Pup.
• The Silverrun Sluices (22-28). Under the old weir outside Silverford. A cheating toll-keeper still weighs everyone who passes. Bosses: the Last Toll-Keeper, Lockjaw, Captain Silt Varrow.
• The Sunken Belfry (25-31). Under the Lantern Shrine isle in Lake Sael, east of Lakehearth, by ferry or the Wading Way. Needs The Keeper's Tale. A drowned bell-tower whose ringers still ring. Bosses: the Silt Choir, Bellringer Oweth, the Bell That Remembers. Pet: Bell Minnow.
• Wreckers' Grotto (28-34). At Wreckers' Cove on the Saltmire coast, south-west of Gull's Rest. Someone still lights the false lamps, and the tide floods the caves on a timer. Bosses: the False Lamp, Hookhand Morrow, the Tidewreck.
• The Heartwood Deep (32-38). A cave by Heartwood Pond in the Thornwood, north-west of Greenwatch. A cathedral of the oldest roots, gone sour. Bosses: Thornmother, Bramblegaunt, the Heartwood. Pet: Sproutling.
• The Greystope Depths (35-41). The lower adit of Old Greystope Mine, west of Dunmar Hold. The buried shift is still working. Bosses: Shift-Boss Skarn, Lampless Kettil, the Vein-Eater. Pet: Lamp Beetle.
• The Vine Temple (38-44). On its causeway in the Verdant Deep, north-east of Mossbridge. The vine still guards the temple from a storm long passed. Bosses: the Fen Coven, Mudjaw, the Gardener's Vine.
• The Hall of Nine Clauses (42-48). In the Echoing Gorge in the Stonewake Canyons, south-west of Dhurrun's Cut. Needs The Law of the Cut. An ancient court still in session. Bosses: the Sentinel of No One Above, the Twin Judges, the Echo Magistrate.
• The Lampless Crypts (46-52). Under the Crypt Fields in the Hollow Barrow, south-east of Lampwatch. Every grave-lamp has gone out. Bosses: Hushed Adept Pell, Sir Hallow the Unlit Knight, the Lamp-Eater.
• The Buried Stair (50-56). Under the dunes north-east of Sunhaven. Needs The Scholar's Rubbing. Down into Ashar-Sul, held in the Great Noon. Bosses: the Sundial Sentinel, the Five Unnamed, Vizier Teshet. Pet: Sun Scarab.
• The Tidehold Deeps (54-60). By ferry from Gull's Rest to the Drowned Crown. A sunken city whose flats flood on the pilot's count. Bosses: Pilot Ammeline, the Coral Colossus, the Lampkeeper Below. Pet: Tide Sprite.
• The Open Window (58-64). Past the last Sky Stair Stone, south-east of Windbell Abbey. An aerie above the clouds. Bosses: the Gale Sisters, Wingwarden Talloch, the Unshut Window, and Saphrine the Elder Wyrm, who may let you go if you ask properly.
• The Deepforge (62-68). An adit beside the Lamplit Gallery, east of Dunmar Hold. Needs Heart of the Mountain. The first Dunmar halls, where the engines never stopped. Bosses: the Bellows Twins, the Anvil-Warden, the Slagmother, Forgemaster Ingrith.
• The Stair That Asks (68-74). Inside the Veilspire, by the Veilspire Observatory. A tower stuck in the middle of one question. Bosses: the Question, the Constellation Warden, the Moving Stair, Ilarion's Echo. Pet: Little Star.
• Rimehold (74-80). On the Field of Frozen Banners, east of Lastlamp. Needs The Field of Frozen Banners. A keep frozen with its garrison at their posts. Bosses: the Captain of the Line, the Frostbound Banner, Old Whitepelt, the Last Marchwarden.
• The Nine Anvils (80-88). Behind the Smelter's Vault door, north of Ashfall Camp. Needs The Smelter's Vault. Cinderhold's forge-kings still ring their anvils. Bosses: the King's Table, Cinder Prime, the Automaton Choir, the Ninth King. Pet: Ember Cog.
• The Hush Beneath (88-99), the deepest dungeon in the world. From Corvane's ritual circle in the Hollow Barrow, east of Lampwatch. Needs The Hollow Below. Where the Hushed made silence into a faith. Bosses: the Quietus, the Unsung Choir, the Hollow Herald, the Echo of the Hollow King.

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• Mounts. Press G and stand still for a moment to call your mount, and press G again to get off. Riding makes you faster, starting at +20% with your first mount. Faster mounts will follow for higher levels, up to +50%.
• Your first mount: the Moorland Pony. Odile Fairweather, the stablemaster at Reedlight Inn on the Lamp Road between Wickhaven and Silverford, has lost a pony. Bring Bramble back from the river reeds in Hoofbeats on the Lamp Road and she's yours.
• Mounts don't fight. Attacking, using an ability, rolling or taking a hit throws you from the saddle, and you also get off for deep water, buildings, gathering and crafting. You can't call your mount in combat.
• Track up to five quests at once. Use the new Track / Stop tracking button in your journal (J). Every tracked quest shows on your HUD with its objectives and has markers on the minimap, the world map and in the world. Click a quest in the tracker to point the compass at it.
• Report a bug without leaving the game: press F8 (or choose Report a Bug in the Esc menu). The game takes a screenshot and includes where you were and what you were doing, so you only need to describe what went wrong.
• Foliage distance option in Settings > Graphics, from Low to Max. Max draws grass, flowers and bushes all the way out to your full draw distance.
• The combat meter has a Damage taken section (switch it on in Settings > Interface) showing what you and your party took, blocked, parried, soaked and dodged.
• Click any name in the combat meter for a breakdown by ability: share, hits, crit rate, biggest hit and overhealing. Damage taken splits by enemy, attack and damage type. Pick an earlier fight from the list, or switch to Overall.

Changed

• Your story starts on the Wickhaven quay with First Light at Wickhaven. A Murmur in the Moor now comes later, when you carry Brother Ansel's letter to Warden Isolde in Hearthmoor. If you have already started it, nothing changes for you.
• One bank grid. The bank's top tabs are gone: it is a single scrollable grid. New characters start with 80 slots and can buy 40 more at a time at any bank. Existing banks keep every slot they had and every item stays put; press Sort to tidy items from the old tabs together.
• New melee swings for every weapon. Two-handed weapons have a proper heavy wind-up and a full-body arc, and swing trails now follow your weapon's actual path. Melee abilities look like what they do: Cleave sweeps, Lunge thrusts, Whirlwind spins.
• Grass, flowers and bushes reach much further on High, and thin out gradually instead of popping in.

Fixed

• Lamps light up from far away. At night, lamps, lanterns, braziers, campfires and lit windows glow as far as you can see, with a soft pool of light on the ground around them.
• Closing your last open window with Esc puts you straight back into mouse-look, without an extra click.
• The combat meter starts fresh for each fight instead of adding every fight together.
• Your third melee hit plays its own finisher, and the blade connects on screen exactly when the hit lands.
• Other players no longer look like they are casting a spell while winding up a melee ability.

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• The Settings window (F10) no longer cuts off options or the Keybinds tab. Every tab is visible from the start, the window keeps one size when you switch tabs, and long lists scroll.

Changed

• The Settings window can now be resized by dragging its bottom-right corner (double-click the corner to reset).

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• Dodge-rolling while standing still now rolls forward in the direction you are facing, instead of an awkward backwards hop.

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• Trying to pick something up with a full bag no longer pops your satchel open. You just get the "satchel is full" message, and the satchel shakes if you already have it open.

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• Fixed minor graphical issues with the anvils, bank, bridge, chapel, fletching station, furnace, small houses, market stall, signpost and well.

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• The whole map is full of creatures now. Every region, from the beaches of Wickstrand to the ash of the Cinderhold, holds roughly eight times as many monster groups as before, spread over the open land and not only along the roads. Expect something to fight in nearly every direction you look.
• Shore crabs are back on the strand. The beach east of the Wickhaven quay is crawling with them, so the Crabs on the Strand lesson has its crabs, and every beach of the coast has its own.
• Regions now mix in the creatures of the roads that lead to them, so the outskirts of a hard region still hold the beasts you met on the way, and wilder places feel less like a single monster per area.

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• Roadside camps. Out between the towns you will now find camps with a fire, a bench, a tent or a cart, and people to talk to: peddlers selling road supplies, camp cooks who will feed you a hot meal, road wardens with advice on what is ahead, prospectors, woodcutters, foragers and anglers (each with their trade's shop), hunters, hermits and wandering scholars. Each region has its own folk with their own rumours.
• Lone hermitages in the wide empty places: a fire, a hut and someone odd who has lived there for years.
• Camps come with their own work. A woodcutters' camp stands in a grove, a prospectors' camp on a seam of ore, an anglers' landing by a fishing spot, a herb-wife's camp in a patch of herbs.

Changed

• Many more things to fight and gather on the way out of Wickhaven and in the whole first ring. Every stretch of road now has a mob group within sight and herbs, ores or trees within a few steps, and the low-level regions are about twice as busy with creatures. The far lands got more ore and herb patches too, while staying wild and dangerous.
• Far fewer empty stretches. Almost every corner of the land now has a camp, a hermitage, a town or a building within about 300 m.

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• Wickhaven has turned green. The village slopes, the Lamp Road north and the coast road east to the Silverrun bridge are now grassy fields with copses, hedgerows, berry bushes and wildflowers. The harbour front keeps its sandy strand.
• Hob Furrow's farm sits beside the Lamp Road just above the village, with hens, cows, haystacks and a scarecrow.
• New Wickhaven locals: Hob the farmer, Wenna the net-mender on the beach, Pip on the square and Tam Rook, a peddler on the coast road. Stop for a chat.
• Gentle wildlife on the roads out of town: hens, hares, cows and the odd giant rat, so your first steps out of Wickhaven have something to swing at.
• New characters now arrive empty-handed. There is no starting sword, armour or tool bag any more. Hallie Brand lends you a hatchet, pickaxe and hammer, teaches you to forge your first dagger, and talks you through the other ways to make your own gear. Nell gives you a net when she teaches you to fish.
• Crabs on the Strand now opens after Tools of the Trade, so you face the crabs with the dagger you forged yourself.

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• Optional damage, healing and threat meters. Switch any of them on under Settings > Interface. They share one small window you can drag anywhere, and closing it turns all three off.
• Damage and Healing meters show each party member's total and per-second rate for the current fight (healing includes shield absorbs). When the fight ends, its numbers stay up until the next one starts.
• Threat meter shows who the enemy you last hit wants to attack. Its current target sits at 100%. Your bar turns amber, then red, as you get close to pulling it onto yourself (110% of the target's threat in melee, 130% at range).

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• The world is twice as wide. Aethermere now spans about 6.4 km from coast to coast, with every region, river and peak where you remember it, only farther apart, and new ground in between: heather moors, pine uplands, birch and autumn woods, red-rock badlands, marram dunes and white chalk downs, blending gradually into one another instead of stopping at a line.
• A new start on the south coast. New characters step off the Order's boat onto the quay at Wickhaven, a small harbour village with its own lamp, smithy, inn, bank and shop. Brother Ansel and the harbour folk teach the basics, then send you up the Lamp Road through Silverford to Hearthmoor Hollow.
• Five new towns and two grown ones. Stonebrook (quarry town), Highpost (wind-post town), Kettlewell (the menders' well) and Fallowmere (the mere village) ring Hearthmoor, Silverford is now a market city on both banks, and Lampwatch is a walled Lamp city. Their banks, inns, smithies, shops and guild halls are buildings you can walk into.
• Ports for the open sea. Wickhaven, Gull's Rest and Brasswater run ferries; three more harbours on the far coasts have docks and route boards for voyages that are not sailing yet.
• Make any inn your home. Ask an innkeeper to "Make this my home" (free). Home Recall (it was Lodge Recall) takes you to your home's Lamp-stone. New characters start with Wickhaven as home; everyone else keeps Hearthmoor until they choose another inn.
• Waking up nearer the fight. When you fall, you wake beside the nearest town Lamp-stone you have attuned, instead of always in Hearthmoor.
• Danger by region, not by compass. Every region has its own level range, and some quiet regions hide dangerous pockets (marked by warning cairns). The roads out from Wickhaven still lead from easy country to hard.

Changed

• Hearthmoor Hollow is now a quieter crossroads. Many of its traders and teachers moved out to the new towns nearby, so the plaza is easier to move through.
• Your character and map come with you. Your position, charted map, attuned Lamp-stones and map pins are carried over to the larger world the first time you log in.
• The Coast Road west of Wickhaven now goes round the lagoon on its sand bar instead of through the water.

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• Shields now come in three sizes, in every metal. Ferris and the other smiths sell them, and you can forge and upgrade each one.
• Round: light and quick. You barely slow down with it raised and still hit hard behind it, but it stops less and covers a narrower arc.
• Kite: the all-rounder, just like shields until now.
• Tower: a wall. It stops the most, covers the widest arc and has the biggest guard bar, but you move slowly and hit softly while it is up, and its guard bar is slower to refill.
• A shield's size is the shape you see. Shields you already own keep their look, so a round shield is now a round shield and a tower shield a tower.

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• Better shields now block better. Every shield takes a flat chunk off each hit before anything else, then a share of what is left, and both grow with the shield's tier, its upgrades and your Guard level. Weak hits from creatures you have outgrown are stopped completely: no damage at all.
• Shields have their own guard bar instead of costing stamina, so your stamina stays free for rolling. Holding the shield up and the hits it takes drain the bar, and it refills once you lower it. A parry gives some back. If it runs dry the shield drops for 2 seconds; if a hit is more than it can take, the shield breaks (you take the full hit and are stunned briefly) and you cannot raise it for a few seconds.
• Your guard no longer tires the longer you hold it.
• Keep fighting behind your shield. You can attack with your weapon while your shield is raised, at reduced damage, and the shield stays up. You also move faster behind a shield than before.
• Raising a weapon guard (no shield) now cancels a swing that has not landed yet, the way a roll does, so the guard comes up at once. Attacking still lowers it.
• Block is now right mouse only by default. You can still bind another key in the settings.

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• Your guard is now a shield of light in front of you instead of a shape on the ground (which looked too much like an enemy attack). Its bright edges show exactly which side is covered, hits ripple across it where they strike, it glows gold while a hit would be parried, and shatters when it breaks.
• Parries are easier to read. A big gold PARRY! callout, the shield flashes gold, staggered creatures say so, and your attack button and reticle glow gold with COUNTER until your bonus-damage counter lands ("Counter!") or the window closes.

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• Walk into buildings. In Hearthmoor, the Listeners' Lodge (the bank), the inn, the smithy and the general store are now open: walk through the door, and the roof and nearer walls fade away so you can see the room. The banker, cook, smith and shopkeeper, and their counters, range, furnace and anvil, are inside. Walls stop arrows, spells and swings, so no more shooting through them.
• Gathering perks. Mining, Woodcutting, Fishing and Foraging now unlock perks as you level: a little faster at 10, 30, 50, 70 and 90; a chance of an extra item at 20, 40, 60 and 80; bonus finds (gems, feathers, pearls, starbloom and more) at 25 and 65; resources that last longer at 35 and 75; bait savings for fishers at 45; and a capstone at 99. Level-ups announce each new perk, and the Skills panel lists them.
• Resize the bank window by dragging its corner. It remembers the size.
• Bank space you buy shows in your Main tab too, after a "Vault expansion" divider, as well as in the Vault tab. Deposits into Main fill it after Main's own slots.

Changed

• Gather at the level you can craft with it. Each tier's ore, logs and cloth fibre can now be gathered at the same level you need to work them, and its hatchet and pickaxe at that level too (iron 10, coal and willow 20, mithril and maple 30, adamant and yew 40, dhurrite and wispwood 55, aether 75). Fish are caught at the level you can cook them.

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• A new welcome. The title, sign-in, character and world screens now sit in a live 3D valley at dusk or golden afternoon, with lamp-glow, chimney smoke, fireflies and drifting runes in the seven Scroll colours. The camera glides between screens instead of cutting.
• Character select: each character stands on a carved stone pedestal in their gear and waves when chosen.
• Character creation: Body, Face and Hair tabs, the camera moves in for face and hair, drag or arrow keys to turn, named colour swatches, a live nameplate and a Surprise me button.
• World select: worlds are cards showing how busy they are, your ping and a Recommended ribbon. Arrow keys and Enter work throughout.
• Upgrade your crafted gear +1, +2, +3. Rework a crafted weapon or armour piece at the same station with more of its tier's material. Each step is a little stronger and needs a little more level; +3 edges past the next tier's base item. Upgraded items show a gold +N on their icon and "Quality +N of +3" in the tooltip.
• The crafting window tells you where to get a missing tool, e.g. "Chisel: sold at the Hearthmoor General Store".

Changed

• Craft gear at the level you can wear it. Every combat style now has craftable gear at every tier, made at the same level needed to wear it: Smithing for melee weapons, plate and shields; Fletching for bows, crossbows, staves and wands; Tailoring for leather, cloth, quivers and tomes. Material processing (bars, leather, cloth, planks) follows the same levels.

Fixed

• Buying bank space works, and clearly. The "+40 bank slots" button was half hidden under your satchel and looked like a satchel upgrade. It now sits at the top of the bank, says it's for the bank, and after you buy, the bank jumps to the tab holding your new slots and makes them glow.

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• Light a campfire anywhere. Use your tinderbox on logs (or right-click logs and choose Light fire) to build a fire everyone can see. Better wood burns longer: 1 minute for plain logs up to 3 minutes for wispwood. Lighting one gives a little Cooking XP.
• Cook on a campfire. Everything you can cook on a range works on a campfire, though food burns a little more often there. You can't light fires on water, bridges, town roads, indoors, or right next to another fire or workstation.
• Drag to drop. Drag an item out of your satchel and let go over the world to drop it. Locked slots, quest items and bound items stay put.

Changed

• Burnt food stacks (burnt fish, meat and bread).

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