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FEATURES
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• Challenge Runs arrive on the main menu, just under New Game. Each challenge sets its own rules and goal, stays open for good and starts any time with Take the Challenge.
• The Challenge Runs screen lists every released challenge newest first, with its art, tagline, goal, rules, honor title and banner. A chip marks each one New, In progress or Passed. The main menu notice counts how many are new and how many you have passed. The New Game screen links to the list.
• The first challenge, Never-Ending Patience, is out. Your whole roster is immortal but every recruit carries a flaw, the guild starts with no inherited buildings and you have 80 years to defeat Capricorn. A pass earns the title The Patient.
• A pass earns the challenge's title, its badge, its pass letter whenever you make it, and fancy banner for your home page.
• A challenge run keeps its rules. Difficulty changes, redemption codes and ghost guild imports stay closed until you meet the goal or leave the challenge. You can leave any run from Settings ▸ Difficulty and it then plays as an ordinary game.
• A challenge run opens on the challenge's own sealed letter in place of Callum Dundry's inheritance letter. A copy also waits in your inbox to reread.
• Every challenge you pass becomes a badge of honor, cut from the challenge's card art and shown in a dock along the foot of the main menu. Twelve badges complete a set, which earns the Year-Round title.
• Five new Steam achievements, D-Tier through S-Tier, unlock at 1, 3, 6, 9 and 12 challenge passes. Only passes made under the signed-in Steam account count and runs played in Twitch Mode or with mods don't.
• Dungeons now open near Hiltcrest. Every so often the ground tears open at the town's edge: the old copper mine, the chapel catacombs, a sinkhole in the orchard. A Surface Breach appears in the Raids section of the Quests tab with a three-week fuse and the Front Desk warns you when one week is left. Answer it, or what is down there comes up into Hiltcrest. They are rare, about two a year.
• One party, one sitting, three tries. Send a full party of five, draw their line, pack what they can carry and go down. Every fight is a full hex battle in the arena. Between rooms you choose: press on, make camp, light a lantern or turn back with what you have. A party that comes up short leaves the breach open and another can go down the next week: one attempt a week, three before the fuse runs out.
• Sealing a breach's lair gives up Soul Shards: 1 from a Crack, 2 from a Breach and 3 from a Chasm. An elite chamber has a 10% chance of one more.
• Shards go into one guild reserve. Each one saves the next hero who would die anywhere, after every other save (their own Grimoire of Salvation first) and leaves them with a critical injury instead. A toggle keeps your shards for the Soul Crystal.
• Ten shards forge a Soul Crystal that binds one hero to Hiltcrest for life. They become Undying. They still age and retire, but they can never be traded, sold, transferred, poached or released and never desert in a mutiny. Their contract renews at the same wage instead of lapsing.
• The main menu is now a living harbor scene. The Tower's beacon pulses, chimney smoke drifts, glints play on the bay, gulls cross the sky and the painting shifts gently with your pointer.
• The menu's weather follows the clock: golden hour from 9am to 9pm US Central time and a night storm with rain and lightning from 9pm to 9am, the same sky for every player. On some stormy nights, some cool things happen in the clouds, lit by the lightning.
• The menu's choices now hang as notices on a chained board and this whole setup is my homage to Warcraft III, one of my all-time formative games.
• A banner pole on the menu flies your guild's colors and crest once you have chosen them in Guild Settings, or plain linen if you have no save, OR a banner you earn via in-game rewards. A badge whose banner is in the game has a fly control that runs that banner up the pole. October's banner is the first that can fly.
• The CCL tab can now open in its own window from the ⧉ at the end of its strip, like Markets and Recruit. Weeks tick live in that window and a CCL event that starts focuses it instead of pulling your main view away.
• On the Front Desk, the World Event, Parties and Guild Commander panels now pop out into their own windows too and remember where you put them. A popped-out World Event window stays open between events and waits for the next one.
• Edit Layout now has a Saved layouts drawer. Keep up to 8 named layouts, switch between them in one click with a 5-second Undo and copy any of them as a code that pastes into another install.
• Scout specializations now change how a scout works. Martial (the old Combat), Physical, Mind and Personality give about 30% tighter stat ranges on their own stat groups (35% for Martial). OVR Read (the old Potential Eval) tightens the overall rating range by 30% and General scouts 10% faster.
• Personality scouts also add 20 to their skill when rolling to spot a hidden flaw in Watch Mode. A scout's specialization and what it does now show on the staff card, the Scout Capabilities row and the recruit list.
• Scout priority templates can now rank single staff jobs, crafter professions, gatherer types and adventurer classes. Use Narrow a scope in the Priority Order editor. Classes has a search box.
• The Recruit board's Adventurers list can now save its filters and sort as named views (up to 10) and switch between them with one pick.
• In Markets ▸ Guilds, picking a material with They have selected now shows a second "and need:" dropdown, so you can find guilds that have what you want and need what you can offer. A new Asks/u column shows what each guild would charge per unit.
• Clicking a guild in that paired search opens a materials trade with one unit of each material already on each side, skipping any side the guild or you can't fill.
• The battle view's company rail has a new Lowest HP % chip. It lists your heroes by the lowest share of max HP first, with each row showing its percent. The enemy rail re-sorts by the most-hurt first. Your choice is remembered.
Parties & Training
• A new Keep seat pin on a party slot means a hero benched by Substitute for a deploy takes the seat back when the party returns.
• Training party cards now have an Auto-train row too. It shows Auto with a Disable Auto button while a drill is repeating, or Set up repeating drills, which opens Party Training with that party already picked.
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BALANCE
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• The Lethality slider now works both ways on quests and raids. Set below 1x, it can spare a hero who would have fallen on a quest (at most half of those falls), who comes home with a critical injury instead. Set above 1x, it can claim a wounded raider who survived the fight. At 1x nothing changes and Tower fights are unaffected.
• A raider saved from a killing blow by your raid's death protections (strategy, provisions, guild bonuses or difficulty) now comes home with an 8-week critical injury instead of walking away unhurt.
• The Floor 100 boss has been buffed.
• A World Boss's top rungs no longer run far past any reachable strength on wide or steep Custom Difficulty Tower settings.
• Back-line healers have received a nerf. stay about half as durable as they were before the August durability change. Every healer takes more damage per hit and a healer who works from range 3 or more, like the Priest, also has 30% less maximum HP. Healers who fight up close, like the Holy Paladin and the Balance Monk, keep the standard HP pool. These numbers are staying, so keep a tank in front of them.
• Rival parties of five in Crown Cup League bouts no longer fight above their listed rating. They had a hidden bonus of up to about 40% and are now rated the same way as your party.
• Guild Duels now move only the wager. The winner takes the loser's stake and there is no longer a 1,000g purse for the winner or 250g for the loser, so a Friendly duel pays no gold.
• Buying back a graduate you delivered to a rival through a Training Commission now costs at least the commission gold you were paid. The floor applies on the trading block, in fire sales, in rival offers and in direct trades. Graduates delivered before this update have no floor.
• Flickering Wand and Tarot Deck now take Catalysts instead of Magical Essence. Every standard recipe can now be crafted from materials the open market sells without the Rare Imports favor.
• On the smaller joint operation a Tier 2 Tavern opens, a failure that drives off your partner's people now costs 7 extra trust instead of 15. The full Tier 9 operation still costs 15.
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QUALITY OF LIFE
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• A joint operation's letter at the Front Desk now carries the partner guild's leader portrait and its name in the guild's color and signs off with the guild's name.
• Accepting a joint operation keeps you in your inbox. The letter then has an Open the Quest Board button while the operation is posted or underway.
• Joint operations now wear an Allied Operation banner on the Quest Board and the allied fighters in the writ show their portraits.
• A joint operation's Battle Report now lists the allied party with each fighter's class and OVR and the bonus they added. The replay names the allied guild.
• The writ and the partner's letter now state the extra trust you lose if a failed operation forces their people to fall back (a 30% chance). The feed line names the trust lost when it happens.
• The Nemesis panel's "Fight alongside them" route now appears once a Tier 2 Tavern lets a partner propose a joint operation, not only at Tier 9. It also tells you when your nemesis's proposal is waiting at the Front Desk.
• The feed line for a new proposal now says the letter is at your Front Desk and how many weeks you have to reply.
• A material's buy panel on the Exchange now shows the Market ask (115% of market at default settings) and the discount actually taken off it. When your buy discounts pass the 90% cap it says so and explains the price floor. The sell panel shows the matching Market bid (85% of market).
• The Exchange's Movers now print what moved each price, such as "rivals bid up" or "settling", so you can read it on touch screens too.
• Marketplace, Master of Coin and Merchant Consortium sell bonuses now say that the same amount counts toward your Market buy discount.
• Building synergies now show on the Tier Roadmap at the tier that unlocks them, with the partner building, the tier both need and whether the synergy is Active, Suspended or Not active.
• A synergy switched off by a damaged building now stays on the Synergies bar marked suspended, with a tooltip naming the building to repair.
• Sage's Wisdom and the staff panel now say Quartermaster auto-repair comes from Armory T3, not from skill. Any Quartermaster then repairs equipped gear each week at a 15% premium once you switch it on in the Armory. The pre-quest auto-equip claim, which the game never did, is gone.
• Bulk Sell in the Armory is now open to every guild. The Marketplace's Bulk Deals perk still adds its 10% bonus when you sell 3 or more items at once.
• The Rare Imports favor now spells out its crafting bonus: +20 points of success chance, capped at 99%. Success decides only pass or fail and never changes item quality.
• The Tower's raid order sheet now tells you that garrison parties called up for the assault follow the sheet in place of their own orders.
• Damage and heal numbers, CRIT labels and boss HP over the painted battlefield now have a dark outline and the ground sits under a light shade, so numbers stay readable. With High Contrast Text on, the outline is heavier.
• A unit's trait panel in battle now uses the dossier's full trait rows, sorted Positive, Mixed, Flaw then Record and colored by group and rarity with each description shown.
• A quest won with a critical success and no deaths now opens its battle paused at the opening tableau, so you can watch it or skip to the report. Set Battle Presentation to Never to go straight to the report.
• The In battle readout (moves, extra action, crit, output and defense stats) now shows on the Units Dossier's Profile tab, on the Stats tab even before a hero has a career record and on your heroes' cards in battles, Rival Challenges, League Duel replays and Practice bouts.
• The Sage's Limit Break guide now says that one break per floor and the falling chance at higher tiers are Tower rules. On quests and raids each qualifying survivor rolls a flat 1 in 20 at every tier, so more than one can break in the same fight.
• The Adventurer Registry search box now also matches a hero's Drive, Calling road and Ascension step. Advanced filters add an Ambition dropdown listing the Drives and roads on your roster.
• The Registry's Stats sheet now has a Columns picker: All columns, Overview, Offense, Defense, Support or Economy. The Tower columns appear under Overview and Offense.
• Members you extend from the Contract Expiration popup now drop off its list with the counts updating. The popup also keeps your scroll position. Once every listed contract is extended it says so and the red warning and pulsing "Go to Registry NOW" step down.
• New Game+ now opens on your return to your own desk. The founding cinematic, the letter, the Sage's welcome and the Guild Hall feed no longer retell Callum's inheritance. Your worn old buildings are still there to restore.
• Settings ▸ Pop-up Alerts now has a Hidden confirmations row that shows how many you have hidden. Its Show again button brings back every confirmation you turned off with "Don't show me alerts like this."
Interface
• A raid's death-risk chip on the Quest Board now has its own tooltip. It explains that the raid figure is a rough estimate on a different scale from a quest's, so the two don't compare.
• The Custom Difficulty sliders' names, descriptions and reset tooltip are now translated in every supported language instead of showing English.
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BUG FIXES
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• Undying heroes can no longer die on an Emergency Event quest. A failed survival roll now leaves them with an 8-week critical injury instead and uses no Grimoire of Salvation.
• Uploaded custom portraits now show in the small round avatars too, including Commander and staff posts in the feed, staff comments while signing and the CCL squad circles.
• A hero traded to a rival guild partway through making Amends no longer carries the unfinished pledge and Reckoning with them.
• Barracks bunkmates with a Bunk Bond now count as friends. They mourn each other, take a release the way friends do and lift party chemistry instead of lowering it.
• A hero with a "choose ability" Reawaken charge plus ordinary charges now also gets Re-roll Passive and Re-roll Active beside the Choose buttons.
• An old retirement entry in the feed no longer shows a dossier button that opened nothing and left the game acting as if a window were still open.
• Raid cards, the raid bounty panel and the War Table map now show the XP a raid actually pays for a plain victory. Before, they showed about a third to a half of it. A decisive win pays more and a pyrrhic one less.
• The "Drink a healing draught" battle order now works in Tower and World Boss fights. Heroes drink from the Healing Potions the Potions provision hasn't already claimed and every potion they drink is used up.
• Heroes left marked as in the Tower after an ascent has ended now return to rest (or the infirmary if wounded). This unlocks their party for editing again, including on saves where it was already stuck.
• The Raid Preparations forecast now includes the Feast Before Battle bonus when you can pay for the feast and the +2 stats Capricorn heroes get from floor 90, so its odds match the real fight.
• The Recall Force from Tower confirmation no longer warns that the ascent's progress is lost. It now says floors you have cleared stay cleared, which is what happens.
• Swapping a garrison, recalling it and stationing it again in the same week no longer grants the swap's fatigue relief a second time.
• "Rotate in" on a garrison that needs two or three parties now stays disabled until you pick a full complement.
• A building damaged in a Goblin Siege now loses all its tier perks until it is repaired, not just its stat bonuses. A damaged Training Yard no longer grants Sparring Partners and a damaged Reception no longer offers Featured Posting.
• The replay of the sortie that breaks a Goblin Siege now plays after you decide what to do with the goblin hoard instead of getting lost behind that choice.
• Heroes who level up from Goblin Siege sorties or the gate strike now appear in the week review's Leveled Up list.
• A hero on a Calling or Ascension whom Substitute benches for a deploy now takes their seat back when the party returns instead of staying benched and growing restless.
• The Quests tab's deployed-parties count now includes parties on garrison duty, on a frontier patrol or away on a dispatch.
• The ambition line on party cards now shows its tooltip every time, even after you click or drag the card.
• Weekly auto-repair now fixes equipped gear only once it drops to Damaged, unless you pick another threshold in the Repair All selector. It had been patching barely worn gear every week at the maintenance premium. On an older save, pick Worn again if that is the threshold you want.
• Applying several gear improvements at once now skips any pick that is no longer ready and names it in a short notice instead of dropping it silently. The Improvements list no longer counts an artisan who is away on garrison duty or recovering as available.
• Selling a big stack of materials in one sale now pays the same as selling it in smaller batches. Forty units sold into a quiet market now lose about 2% instead of 15%.
• Disable Market now stops the Treasurer's buy orders too, so it fully covers No Market Purchases. The Treasurer still sells for you and the Orders sheet marks each buy as closed.
• For a Vanguard Order guild, gear sold through the Market no longer cuts into the bonus on the Treasury's Equipment & Loot Sales line.
• The Markets price chart's down bars, the Max and sell confirm buttons and the blocked-material toggle show their red fill again.
• A faction letter you answer through a link or with its action buttons now reads as read instead of keeping its unread dot.
• Loading a save from before faction letters had reply windows no longer costs standing for every routine letter already past its window. Those letters now close quietly.
• The Temple's "The Moment of Decision" and the Underworld's "The Third Path" letters now arrive once you reach Exalted standing (750) instead of waiting for the 1,000 cap.
• The Military's Fortress Discipline oath now counts only this season's losses, as its description says (no more than 2 adventurers per 13-week season), including deaths in a season's final weeks.
• A new game no longer starts with the same Merchants contact listed twice under Known Contacts.
• A rival guild that has collapsed no longer writes to propose a joint operation.
• Alliance quest text no longer says your partner's reinforcements die when an operation fails. They fall back from the field, which is all that ever happened to them.
• A former member you re-hire after their contract lapsed now starts with a clean bench record. Their bond and grudges still come back with them.
• The early-departure signing refund (half the signing bonus back when a hero is lost within 8 weeks of hiring) now also pays when the hero dies on a raid or in the Tower.
• The week review's Recruitment Pool Retirements list no longer shows the exact OVR of applicants you never scouted.
• A Tier 3 Academy's rarity bonus no longer opens classes that a trainee's potential tier keeps rarity locked, such as Ultra-Rare and Legendary classes for F-Tier trainees.
• Academy graduates released in an older version no longer wait in the free-agent pool at a flat 100-gold wage. Loading the save re-prices them like any other free agent.
• With Uncap Potential on, heroes on your roster now keep growing with age past their potential tier's ceiling. With F-Tier Challenge on, growth from aging now stops at the F-Tier ceiling.
• Your Commander's advice to rest a hero now stays open for the whole quest, contract or joint operation the Commander launched with that hero instead of being marked ignored (and costing trust) in the second week.
• League Crown Cup matches now keep each hero's box score. The Winter coronation's MVP, All-Tournament and Records pages and the Battle Report fill in and heroes earn Crown Cup and season event career credit, including the title when their guild wins.
• LEAVE on the main menu's league panel now asks you to confirm and says when it will also delete that league's save on this device.
• If this device holds your save for a league, the main menu's league panel always offers RESUME instead of offering to found a fresh guild over it.
• A league trade offer sent after you've ended your turn no longer silently disappears. Send now waits until the league week turns and says why.
• Aldric Ravencroft III, the House Ravencroft heir, now stays with the guild that earned him instead of joining the league's shared youth pool or vanishing when you join a league.
• The battle damage rail no longer merges two different enemies that share a name and a damage total into one row.
• The Bestiary's danger filter no longer gives away creatures you haven't met. Its band chips and results count only discovered creatures.
• A long name no longer pushes the Extend button out of the Contract Expiration popup.
• Settings search no longer offers options your platform doesn't show, such as the desktop-only Display options in a browser or Fullscreen on iOS.
• The Event Sandbox no longer shows a "Skip the telegraph" checkbox that did nothing.
• On touch screens, tapping a button no longer pops up its tooltip as well. Press and hold still shows it.
• On the Front Desk, the World Event card no longer shows buttons that only lead back to the Front Desk.
• On iPads running iOS 15, the game screen keeps its full height and the header's stat tiles compact to fit instead of clipping the Treasury tile.
• The compact synergy card no longer shows pulsing near-miss rings. They now appear only on the enlarged synergy map.
• When a faction letter lapses unanswered, its feed line now names the letter in your language.
• Russian: the Spellward's active, the Spellblade's passive and the Watcher's passive now use their current ability names. The Watcher's passive now correctly says the whole party deals 10% more damage.
Here are the Surface Breach and Soul Shards sections. Put them first under FEATURES, but only post them once your flip is merged. Main still has the breach switch off, so I'll check again before we call the notes final.