The World Polish

A world where every nook and cranny has a story to tell. The whole overworld has been rebuilt with real hills, cliffs and ravines, a walled capital, a new start in Wickhaven, caves to walk into, camps with a tale of their own, re-laid roads and a tree you can chop wherever you see one. The rules of the game are the same. The world you play them in is much better.

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.