Hello everyone!
This one is about knowing what's actually in the game.
Portalborn has grown a lot since launch, and much of it arrived through patch notes that a new player will never have seen.
So the Player Guide has been rebuilt.
📖 The Player Guide
Every page has been rewritten, and two new ones have been added.
That's thirteen pages, in both English and Simplified Chinese.
If you've never opened it, the button is just above your input bar.
Some of what's covered now:
The Loot Filter. Set rules by rarity, automatically sell or dismantle what you don't want, and create protection rules for good rolls before any of that happens. If sorting drops by hand has been eating your time, this is the fix — and it's actually been in the game for a while.
Adventure Difficulty. Four settings, changeable at any time outside combat, with nothing locked behind any of them. If a fight is going badly, this is the first thing to try. And if combat text moves faster than you can comfortably read, the accessibility settings can slow it down or make combat fully turn-based.
Multiclassing and Ascension. The guide now properly explains how class points work, where reputation eventually leads, and what Ascension actually gives you. These are core parts of long-term progression, and the old guide barely explained them.
Portals. Which realms are handcrafted, which are still procedural, and the important fact that almost every normal portal scales to you — there are no level requirements and nowhere you need to wait until you're stronger before entering. The three hard-mode trials are the exception, and are covered separately below.
The Portal Workshop. A full world editor with a grid map, custom monsters, NPCs, and the Class Forge for creating your own playable classes. It's available from the login screen, and a lot of players don't know it's there.
Hero Classes. There's now a page explaining what's coming and introducing the ten Hero Classes currently in development. None of this content exists in the playable game yet — the page makes that clear up front.
❓ In-Game Help
Several help articles were describing Portalborn as it used to work rather than as it works now.
Ascension promised bonuses it no longer gives and described no caps where there are now four. Respec named the wrong level. Multiclassing still referred to a "total level."
All corrected.
New help topics:
help difficulty, help perf, and help craft
And help dismantle now explains item locking.
Help also understands more of the things you'd naturally type. help levels, help alchemy, help infusion, and their Chinese equivalents now take you where you'd expect.
🀄 Chinese Text
This was a large cleanup pass, and some of what I found was ugly.
Workshop text wasn't simply untranslated in places — it was being corrupted.
A CONFIRM button could render as a stat name. class became cl为s. JSON became JS开启.
Twenty-two mangled strings are now down to one.
The difficulty settings also had a naming collision. The "Adventurer" difficulty tier and "Adventurer" character title used the same Chinese word, making the settings row genuinely ambiguous.
The four difficulty tiers now read as difficulty levels rather than job titles.
Also fixed:
The Class Forge now renders in Chinese during character creation.
The alchemy component table is translated.
The alchemy station now has one consistent name instead of two.
Several place names in the guide now match the names actually used in the game.
⚔️ Hard-Mode Portal Entry
The three hard-mode trials — Obsidian Sanctum, Eldritch Void Core, and Ascended Doom Spire — are now checking the right level.
These portals are different from normal Portalborn content.
They don't scale to you. They're meant to be a wall.
The entry check was adding all of your class levels together instead of looking at your highest single class. That meant a character with two classes at level 55 could enter content designed for a level-100 character.
They now require one class at level 100, which is what "level 100" was always supposed to mean.
Anyone already inside one can finish what they're doing.
Two of the trials also had a second problem: they were completely impossible to unlock.
Their requirements were set to levels 105 and 110, even though no base class can reach either.
All three hard-mode trials now unlock at level 100.
📋 Contracts
contracts refresh was rerolling the wrong board.
It charged you, rerolled your bounties, and then printed a success message — so from the outside, it looked like the command had worked.
That's fixed.
Contracts now have their own refresh at the same cost as a bounty reroll, and the refresh button on the board acts on whichever tab you're currently viewing.
I'm sorry about the gold. Anyone who used the command was charged for something they didn't ask for.
I don't have a reliable way to determine who used it or how much each player lost, so unfortunately I can't accurately refund it — but the command now does what you actually paid it to do.
🔧 Smaller Things
The Player Guide's page navigation no longer scrolls out of reach on longer pages.
Portal refusal messages now name the level the game actually checks.
And there are various smaller spelling, terminology, and naming corrections throughout both languages.
Thank you all, as always.
A number of the inconsistencies fixed here came from player reports and questions in the Discussions. They're often what reveals the difference between something working correctly in isolation and actually making sense when someone encounters it in the game.
Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to point one out.
— TheHand