Construction is the twentieth skill. You build furniture for your Holding, the plot of land beside your character, and the building itself is the reward: no item is minted, the experience is the product. It is also the first real use planks have ever had, alongside two new Smithing products, nails and gold leaf, Fifty repeatable pieces run from an oak chair at level 1 to an elder throne at 99, in six wood tiers, and each one assembles on screen stage by stage as you work. Bigger pieces take longer and cost more, but every piece in a tier earns at the same rate, so what you build is a matter of taste and pacing rather than efficiency.
Thirteen one-time builds are the reason to keep going. They are large projects, hundreds of inputs each, and they change how the rest of the game plays.
Restoration Spring, four tiers: every kill restores a quarter, then half, then three quarters, then all of your health.
The altar, three tiers: kills give back more prayer points, and buried bones earn more Prayer experience.
Steadfast Ward, three tiers: stat-draining attacks sap you more slowly, then less deeply, then a kill clears the drain outright.
Pantry: keep a second food equipped.
Superior Garden, two tiers: opens a ninth and tenth farm patch.
Slayer is the twenty-first skill. Three task masters, Brann, Vex and Karst, each hand out assignments matched to what you can handle, and you earn Slayer points for finishing them. Points buy the gear that makes the harder assignments possible. Six creatures arrive with it, and each one has a counter you are meant to bring:
Banshee: without waxen earplugs its scream drains your stats far faster than you can fight through.
Basilisk: meet its gaze without a mirror charm and it does the same.
Dust devil: reinforced goggles, or you fight all but blind and it hits far harder.
Ravager: only a marrow blade or staff marks it, or broadhead arrows if you fight at range. Anything else does nothing at all.
Gargoyle: it takes a mason's maul or a granite maul to break stone.
Vampyre: a warding censer stops it healing off you, and it always leaves vampyre dust, worth a large lump of Prayer experience when offered.
You can walk into any of these unprepared. Nothing stops you except your own level. You will simply lose.
Melee weapons now have an attack type. A blade skids off heavy plate where a maul caves it straight in, so the weapon you bring to metal armour matters as much as the tier of it. Skeletons and gargoyles come apart under crushing blows in particular. The matchup badge on the enemy's health bar tells you when your weapon is the right one.
Six granite pieces drop from the harder Slayer creatures. Granite is the only set in the game that asks for raw Strength as well as skill, fifty of it, and it turns aside arrows better than it does anything else.
The serpentine eye sharpens your accuracy, the blackstone core adds damage, and the third relic drains a little life back with every hit.
Six drop tables were rebuilt so the Slayer creatures pay out at the density the rest of the game does.
Construction pieces take considerably more work each than they did in testing, so the build animation has room to read.
Every Slayer creature's punishment for arriving without its counter was tuned by hand.
The Stats panel now fits its tab instead of leaving a stretch of empty panel below Combat and Economy.
The Bank is wider and lays its sections out in two columns, which roughly halves the scrolling on a full account. Equipped gear no longer takes up space there; the Equipment panel already shows it with more detail.
The collection log fills the full width of its panel.
The guide states how many inputs a recipe takes, not just the experience it gives.
Two new leaderboards, Construction and Slayer, bringing the total to twenty-four.
Three new achievements.
Saves upgrade automatically on first load. Nothing is lost and no level moves.
A gap in the leaderboard rules was closed: a mod that quietly rewrote a recipe's cost or its experience never used to pause uploads, and now it does.
— Vosk