A real job system with four tiers and two mini-games, a library in every city that marks your map, a corner of the screen that finally tells you what to do next, and a notebook you write yourself.
The old "jobs" are gone. What replaced them is one system with four tiers, where the tier decides the shape of the work and your skill decides the flavour.
The board is shared and seasonal. Four to seven postings per city, around 77 across the world, all published at once when the season turns. A posting someone else claims is a posting you can't have. That five-round window is deliberate — a board that turned over faster was unreadable, because you can only see it by standing in the city.
Travel jobs are riders, not detours. A Contract that forces a dedicated round trip pays about 1 coin per action, and nobody sane takes that. Clipped onto a trip you were already making, it pays three to five times better. They're priced for the second case, so plan your season around the board rather than the other way round.
The Errand's danger is the clock, not a dice roll. Deliver on time for coins, run it well for more, miss the shift and get nothing — and the action is spent either way. Higher skill buys you a longer deadline and wider windows. It never makes the run harder.
Contract and above claim a primed rank. If you've trained with a Master and your skill is sitting primed, finishing one of these graded well is what banks the level-up.
Everyone sees the same puzzle — they're generated from the same shared seed, so there's no luck advantage in multiplayer.
Demetry's job bonus used to be coin. Now it's information: Demetry sees all fourteen boards where everyone else sees only their neighbours, and can claim remotely once per round.
Not the Grand Library in Benfriege — that one teaches you skills, and it hasn't changed. The city archive tells you about the country around it. It never gives you a skill level, an item, or a victory point.
Three shelves:
Five kinds of lead: a Coin Cache, Rich Ground (better excavating and gathering there), Strange Energy (a magic sword fragment may be sleeping), a Proving Ground (bonus combat XP for winning there), or a Field Study (bonus skill XP). You can carry three, no two alike.
The record names the kind of find, never the place. Your Critical Thinking sets the grade, not whether you succeed — a poor reading still leaves with a lead, so the action is never wasted. A better grade pays more and puts the tile closer.
It won't send you somewhere that kills you. Before pointing at a tile, the archive checks that tile's real hazards and enemies against your Survival and Combat. Ruins want Survival 6 and Combat 35. The wilderness wants Combat 50. At Survival 6 and Combat 50 the whole map opens up — a gate that only ever tightened would be the feature closing down exactly as you got good at the game.
Coins are the way out, never the prize. There's no way to drop a lead from the archive. Walk to the tile and Salvage the Site: take a handful of coins and lose the lead. The card names what you're about to destroy before you click, and salvaging always pays less than following the lead would have.
Benfriege's reading room is special. As the Grand Library's public shelf, it's the only archive that offers you two tiles and lets you choose. Information, not power. And carrying a book you borrowed from the Grand Library upstairs makes every archive in the realm read better for you.
The old quest and boost corner is gone. In its place: a rail that's always on, with labelled Quests and Boosts pills carrying live counts — and underneath them, one line of text showing the next step of whatever you're tracking.
That line is the point. There is now always a sentence in the corner telling you what to do.
Click a pill and a drawer slides open: icon, name, next step, and a status chip with the number that matters — 3 rd, 2/4, GO. Hover a row for the full text, the location, and two buttons: Show on Map and Pin to Journal.
The Journal is new: a parchment page where you write and edit your own notes, and they save with your game. Press N or J. Pin an objective to it and the title comes across so you can write your own plan underneath.
Q opens quests, B opens boosts, and the bag moved to I.
The player-to-player trade page is new from the ground up.
Five real bugs died here, all of them older than this release. The worst: item trades delivered nothing at all — coins worked, items silently vanished. Also fixed: a typo that left you permanently flagged as "trading", retracting an offer dropping back to English, and iron, sand and beads being labelled "no quick-sell value" when they simply sell for a low price.
The end screen was one chart. It's now four tabs of proper post-match analysis, led by The Race — everyone's victory points over every round, on one shared scale, with gold pins at every lead change and a shaded band over the closest stretch of the whole match. Players who were never really in it are drawn dimmer, so the actual duel reads first.
See you out on the road.