Two releases bundled together. v0.60.11 (The Gauntlet Patch) reworked the Anchor Road Gauntlet from "ten waves of random monsters" into a proper gladiatorial arena with seven named Old God champions, real stakes on a loss, and a five-tier completion title system. v0.61.0 (Wilderness Reborn) added two entirely new systems to the previously-dim Wilderness: Druid's Shrines for daily 24-hour attunement buffs tied to each Old God, and Beast Taming for permanent wild-creature companions including a brand-new 5th party slot for combat pets. Plus a handful of polish fixes folded in along the way.
Before this patch, the Gauntlet was ten waves of random monsters. After: ten waves split into three themed warmup acts (condemned criminals, escaped slaves, drunk old gladiators, dire beasts, hooded foreign sellswords) and seven hand-crafted named champions, one per surviving Old God, fought in canonical difficulty order:
Each champion has a multi-line herald announcement read with timing beats, a one-line god-lore reveal, a crowd reaction, and a themed equipment drop on defeat. Between every fight, a crowd-ambiance line prints from a pool of twelve (vendors shouting bets, slaves raking blood out of the sand, drums starting in the upper tiers, priests praying loudly to nobody). The Gauntlet finally feels like a scene from Spartacus instead of a hallway brawl.
The Gauntlet used to be the safest combat in the game: a loss cost the entry fee and a daily slot, nothing else. Doesn't match its framing as the city's deadliest arena. Now every loss rolls a 25% chance of being a real death (consumes a resurrection, can trigger permadeath in online mode) or a 75% drag-out (medics restore you to 1 HP, but you forfeit 5% of your current XP, all Fame you'd earned this run, plus an additional Fame penalty). Flee is still the safe exit.
The pre-fight disclaimer was rewritten in all five languages so the player sees the 25% death chance BEFORE committing gold.
Surviving any wave now grants Fame (the same currency that gates knighthood). Curve: waves 1-3 give 1 Fame each, waves 4-6 give 2 each, waves 7-9 give 3 each, wave 10 gives 5, plus a 20 Fame bonus on full clear. A full ten-wave clear earns 43 Fame, about a quarter of the way to knighthood (which requires 150).
On a full ten-wave clear, the player earns a tier title based on level at moment of completion:
A Lv 80 Grand Champion clear earns 120,000 gold, 56,000 XP, and 150 Fame. A Lv 10 Hopeful clear earns 2,000 gold, 1,000 XP, and 30 Fame. Roughly a 60x range top to bottom, so the difficulty payoff scales meaningfully. The stored tier only upgrades, never downgrades. Each tier has its own individually-earnable achievement.
Grand Champion completion grants a permanent +3% damage, +3% defense passive. Stacks with knighthood, so a knighted Grand Champion gets +8% / +8% lifetime.
Pre-fix: 100 gold per level. Lv 100 = 10,000 gold. Trivial endgame. Now: level squared, times 10. Lv 5 = 250 gold, Lv 20 = 4,000, Lv 50 = 25,000, Lv 100 = 100,000. Below level 10 it's actually cheaper than before (encouraging early players to try it); above that the cost climbs sharply.
Player feedback after the initial Gauntlet ship: "the arena master titles should be configurable and not stuck on a player if they beat the arena, just like all the other titles." Fixed. Arena tier titles now flow through the standard NobleTitle field. Visit Preferences > Title to swap to Sir/Dame (if knighted), to a meta-progression title (if earned across cycles), or to "(None)" for no prefix. The Grand Champion combat bonus stays gated on the achievement itself, not the displayed title, so hiding the title doesn't cost the buff.
The Gauntlet now caps at 1 run per day. Without a cap, even with the rebalanced loot, an endgame player could grind seven champion drops per attempt indefinitely. Matches the daily-limit pattern already used for Love Street, drinking games, and team wars. Runs remaining today now shows on the arena entry screen alongside the entry fee.
Pre-fix: pay to reforge, see the new stats, accept or revert to the original. So a player could pay, peek at the result, revert if worse, and try again. The gold cost was the only downside. Defeated the whole gamble design. Fixed: once you pay, the reforge sticks. Whatever rolls is what you get. The pre-confirm prompt is the only decision point now, rewritten in all five languages to make commitment explicit.
Player report: someone put two +6 Dexterity enchants on the same piece of gear. The cap on enchants per item (five) was enforced, but what KIND of enchant filled each of those slots was not. Fixed: each item can carry up to five enchants, but no two of the same kind. Picking the same stat twice (or trying to stack five Divine Blessings on one weapon) is refused before the gold deducts. Pre-fix items with stacked same-kind enchants keep their existing bonuses; they just can't keep stacking that kind.
The Wilderness was the dimmest spot on the map. Combat encounters thinner than the dungeon's, foraging that copied home herb-gathering, and one-shot lore fragments with no replay value. This release turns it into a daily-essential destination with two systems that don't exist anywhere else in the game.
Five ancient shrines stand in the wild lands, each tied to a surviving Old God whose domain bleeds out into the wilderness. Make pilgrimage to one shrine per day and gain a 24-hour passive buff:
Manwe and Thorgrim deliberately have no shrine. Manwe is the endgame Creator, Thorgrim's thematic location is the Prison rather than the wild.
Visiting a shrine shifts alignment (Aurelion +5 Chivalry, Noctura +3 Darkness, Maelketh +2 Darkness, Terravok and Veloura neutral). One attunement at a time; visiting a new shrine breaks the previous one. Per-shrine favor counter persists across attunements and across NG+ cycles. At 10 visits to the same shrine, that god grants a permanent stat lift themed to their domain:
Access is outside the expedition flow. Visiting a shrine doesn't consume one of the four daily expedition slots. Pilgrimage is its own daily ritual.
New Pilgrimage option on the wilderness main menu. The pilgrimage menu shows all five shrines with their region, passive summary, favor count, and active highlight. Pick one, read the flavor description, confirm, get attuned. Active attunement also shows on /health Active Buffs and on the wilderness main menu so you always know what's running.
Wandering the wilderness now sometimes turns up wild creatures that can be tamed and added to a permanent pet roster (cap 8). One active pet at a time, switchable at Home via the new Tamed Beasts option:
Encounter chance is about 8% per wilderness expedition AFTER the normal encounter resolves. The pool is filtered by region, player level, and "not already in your roster" so each tame is a new addition. If the pool is empty, no beast appears. If your roster is at cap (8), you see a flavor "you spot one but your hands are full" line.
When an encounter fires, you get 3 attempts to tame the creature. Each attempt rolls d20 + (CHA / 4) + (DEX / 8) against the beast's tame difficulty (range 12 for the Mountain Goat, 21 for the Storm Eagle). Charisma matters more than Dexterity, which means a Veloura-attuned bard or jester is far more effective at taming than a pure damage build. Three failures means the beast despawns for this expedition. Try again next time.
Combat pets (Dire Wolf, Storm Eagle) cannot permanently die. Their HP restores automatically at the end of every fight, and they earn a small amount of XP toward their own pet level whenever you win.
"Your family has grown" notification: pointed at Love Corner instead of Home for newborn children, which is the wrong location. Children live at Home (the Family menu); Love Corner is for dating and marriage. Fixed in English, Spanish, French, Italian. Hungarian was already correct.
Street-encounter NPC murder-cap bypass: player report showed a Lv 71 character killing 8 named NPCs in 20 minutes via random street encounters for roughly 30,000 stacked XP. The daily murder cap (3 non-bounty NPC kills per day) was enforced on player-initiated attacks but not on random hostile-NPC encounters. Now both paths share the cap. Going over the cap doesn't block the fight (you can't refuse a random encounter), but it claws back 90% of the XP and gold from the fourth and subsequent named-NPC kills. Throwaway random brawlers (Burly Mercenary, Mugger, Drunk Sailor) don't count. Honor duels and inn brawls also exempt.
Localization: all 66 new English keys translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and Hungarian. Five language files at full key parity (18,445 keys each, JSON valid).
Beta is live. Bug reports and feedback always welcome. Press the ! key in-game or type /bug to report. See you in the arena. Or the wilderness. Or both.