v0.3: Reforged - Combat, Progression & the Compendium

Fractured Realms v0.3 - Reforged

This is the biggest patch since launch. Over the last couple of weeks combat,
progression, pacing and the economy have been rebuilt almost from the ground up,
the in-game Compendium you voted for is here, and there are dozens of fixes and
quality-of-life changes on top. Enormous thanks to everyone in the Discord and
the reviews who reported bugs, argued balance and told us exactly where the game
felt off. A huge amount of this patch came straight from you.

It is a long read. That is on purpose. Here is everything.

💬 A word on the slower pace (please read)

The single biggest change in this patch is one you will feel more than see: the
whole game is slower now, and that is completely on purpose.

From the very start, the game I set out to build was a long-term one, in the
spirit of Melvor Idle and Old School RuneScape. A game you settle into for months
rather than finish in a weekend. Where a level means something because you truly
earned it, where achievements and milestones mark a real journey, and where you
can set it running, forget about it for a while, get on with life, and come back
to genuine progress waiting for you. An experience that leaves a mark.

The old rates were fun in a fast, dopamine sort of way, but they burned through
that journey far too quickly. So XP across the whole game has been re-paced to
give every level, every unlock and every milestone the room it deserves to
matter. This is the version of Fractured Realms I always pictured.

To be clear: none of your current levels were touched. Nothing was taken away.
Only the road ahead is longer.

This is a big shift, and I genuinely want to know how it lands for you. Please
tell me how it feels to play now: too slow, about right, which skills drag, where
the pacing sings. Your feedback is exactly how we dial this in together. Thank you
for being here for it.

✨ New Features

• The Compendium (in-game wiki). A full searchable guide to the entire
  game on its own page, reachable from the sidebar and the book button in the
  bottom bar. Every skill, item, recipe, drop source, map and enemy, with real
  numbers pulled from the game itself so it never drifts out of date.
• Compendium: everything is cross-linked. Click a yield, a rare drop or
  an ingredient to open that item's own page. Each item page lists every source it
  comes from (with drop rates), everything it is used for (grouped by skill with
  icons), its description and value.
• Compendium: recipe sources. Recipe-gated dishes now show a "Recipe
  unlocked by" section telling you exactly which dig or drop the recipe scroll
  comes from, so you are never stuck wondering how to make something.
• Compendium: tabs. Keep several pages open at once and switch between
  them. A Home tab is always pinned at the top, and your open tabs survive leaving
  the Compendium, reloading, and switching character.
• Compendium: click-to-find. Clicking through to a skill scrolls straight
  to the exact row you came for and flashes it, so you never have to hunt a long
  table.
• The Combat Triangle (melee / ranged / magic). Every open-world enemy
  now has an attack style and a weakness, and many have an element. Match the
  weakness and it dies faster (roughly +25% for style, +15% for element, more when
  both line up). Your armour type now matters against what is hitting you.
• Combat Triangle panel. The enemy card now shows what the enemy attacks
  with, what it is weak to, its element, and whether you are matched up, colour
  coded by style. It is efficiency, never a hard wall - any style can clear
  anything.
• Home / character-select screen. Pick your save when the game opens,
  from a screen showing all five characters with name, total level, combat level,
  playtime and cloud-backup status. One character is active per session.
• Prestige that actually does something. Prestige ranks were cosmetic
  before. Every rank now grants a real, permanent bonus to that skill: +1% XP and
  +0.5% speed per rank, up to +10% XP and +5% speed at rank X, shown live in the XP
  breakdown.
• Auto-heal out of combat. Once you leave a fight you slowly regenerate
  health back to full (unlocks alongside auto-eat). It never triggers inside a
  dungeon or raid, so those still test your food supply.
• Open-world enemies drop loot again. Every open-world enemy now has a
  proper, themed drop table (details below), and every drop is listed and linked in
  the Compendium.

⚔️ Combat Rework

• Weapons rebuilt. Every weapon now has separate accuracy and damage
  stats, and ranged and magic each got split into two stats like melee (they used
  to be a single combined stat).
• Weapon families have a real feel. Spread across the tree so a fast,
  accurate dagger plays very differently from a slow, heavy warhammer.
• Armour finally matters. Full-set armour totals were raised massively at
  every tier (endgame roughly 469 metal, 403 leather, 357 robe, up from around 80),
  so the right set roughly halves the hits you take.
• Armour types balanced against each other. Plate is best against melee
  and worst against magic, robes are the reverse, leather sits between. Leather and
  robe are no longer just weak.
• Ranged the OSRS way. Arrows now carry the ranged damage, from bronze up
  through the tiers, so your ammo choice drives your hits.
• New Dragonite arrow as the endgame ammo upgrade.
• Four new elemental arrows (Ember, Frost, Storm, Shadow) with real
  effects: Burn (damage over time), Chill (slows the enemy's attack), Shock (chance
  to loose a second arrow), Enfeeble (lowers enemy defence). Live in normal,
  dungeon and raid fights.
• Magic rebuilt around rune tiers. Element damage multipliers were
  flattened (about a 15% spread instead of 47%), so fire is no longer the universal
  best pick.
• Rune tier now matters. Minor, standard and elder runes step up both the
  damage and the strength of the effect.
• Spell identities. Storm genuinely strikes twice, Ice is a true freeze
  that skips the enemy's next attack, Shadow and Void keep their character.
• Magic auto-casts from level 1. Click a spell to toggle continuous
  casting. Spell cards show live, real numbers for the tier you have selected.
• New combat visual feedback. The enemy health bar recolours and pulses
  for lingering statuses (burn, freeze, curse), each with its own rhythm, and
  flashes in the element's colour on each cast, with distinct proc animations.
  Built photosensitivity-safe, no harsh flashing.
• Every open-world enemy retuned. All 48 had their HP and max hits
  rewritten around your actual power and a target kill time (regular fights around
  21 to 47 seconds).
• No more one-shots. Enemy attack multipliers were capped (from up to
  x5.5 down to x2.5) and every enemy's effective max hit capped to around 70% of
  your health bar. An audit that found 33 of 104 enemies able to kill you from full
  health now finds zero.
• A difficulty spike fixed where a mid-game enemy was badly over-scaled
  and hit harder than enemies well above it.
• Elite / bounty ("wanted") mobs are a real threat. Named targets hit
  harder (more HP, bigger max hit, around half your bar) for high-risk,
  high-reward hunts, while ordinary field mobs stay safe to idle.
• Fixed a combat freeze where using a rune tablet to land the killing
  blow would drop the enemy to zero health but never resolve the kill, locking up
  the fight. Fixed in open world, dungeons and raids.
• The ice / freeze effect actually fires now. A timing bug meant the slow
  was being consumed by the very attack it was supposed to stop, so it never
  worked.
• Burn no longer leaks between fights and no longer leaves the enemy bar
  stuck orange after you leave combat.

📈 Progression & XP

• The great slowdown. XP rates across the game were roughly ten times too
  fast. All 14 non-combat skills were retuned onto a consistent curve, aimed at a
  bit faster than Melvor rather than several times faster (gathering with tools and
  outposts lands around 125 to 152 hours to 99).
• Your levels are safe. The slowdown does NOT de-level anyone. Nothing is
  taken away. Only future earning is paced.
• Gathering (all six) had intervals stretched and XP-per-action retuned,
  with gold-per-second shaped so it peaks second from the top and drops off at the
  final tier (endgame nodes are deliberately worth a little less).
• Artisan (all five: cooking, brewing, smithing, crafting, glyphweaving)
  retuned so the base skilling items are your main XP route and crafted products
  are a secondary route.
• Agility, cartography and prayer brought onto the same curve.
  Cartography was restructured so world maps carry you to about 88 and deep-sea
  surveys are the endgame 88 to 99 grind.
• Combat XP fixed. Combat XP used to depend only on damage dealt and
  ignored which enemy you fought (the big "+200 XP" numbers were cosmetic). It is
  now tied to each enemy's real value, paid across the fight.
• Trivial content gives less. Combat XP now scales down for enemies far
  below your level, so farming weak mobs is no longer the best XP.
• Bounty reworked toward a Slayer feel. Bounty XP is paid per kill and
  kept even if you abandon a contract, normal contracts pay far more (Rat Cull went
  from 60 to 942 XP), and one-off wanted bosses carry a premium. Target pacing is
  around 200 hours to 99.
• No more endless Rat Culls. Because the first contract now grants a real
  amount of XP, finishing one immediately unlocks the next tier.
• Prestige XP re-paced. Reaching full prestige on a skill now takes
  roughly 65 hours of post-99 play, scaled per skill so fast and slow skills feel
  consistent.
• Prestige cleanup. Tinkering and cartography were removed from the
  prestige list (tinkering has had no actions for months, cartography has a finite
  amount of XP and cannot overflow), leaving 14 prestige skills.
• Death penalty reworked. Dying now costs 5% of your gold (minimum 10, no
  upper cap) on open-world death, dungeon failure and raid failure. You respawn at
  10% health, and the log tells you exactly how much you lost, so it reads as a
  fair, intentional penalty rather than a flat fee the rich never noticed.

⚖️ Balance & Economy

• Cooking economy fixed. Cooked food now reliably sells for more than its
  raw ingredients, so cooking makes a profit, but always under double the input
  value so there is no buy-cook-sell infinite-gold loop.
• Dishes and feasts are worth it. Multi-ingredient dishes and hearty
  meals are worth more gold and heal more than plain cooks.
• Food healing is clean tiers by level: 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 / 25.
• Smithing forge levels are continuous with no dead zones between tiers.
• Bar levels line up with the ore's mining level (some bars were
  craftable before you could mine the ore).
• Gear costs are monotonic so higher-tier gear is never cheaper to make
  than lower-tier.
• Money is no longer trivial mid-game. The mass-craft-and-sell staff loop
  that printed hundreds of thousands of gold was corrected (a Duskwillow Staff now
  sells for barely more than its inputs).
• Item sell values made consistent where cooked or crafted items were
  priced below their inputs.
• Outpost XP bonus capped at +25% (5% / 15% / 25% across the three
  tiers), with headroom for future upgrades.
• XP displays now include your bonuses (outposts, seals, tools and more)
  across all 14 skills, instead of only the base number.
• Dragonite gear now equips at level 90 (was 88).

🎯 New Loot: what enemies drop now

• Beasts drop meat and hides or pelts (cooking and crafting materials).
• Bandits, knights and other humanoids drop gems (they hoard treasure),
  scaled by level from sapphire up to onyx, feeding jewellery crafting.
• Dragons hoard gems too.
• Mages and magical creatures drop runes matched to their theme (a fire
  creature drops fire runes, an ice creature ice runes, and so on), easing your
  magic ammo cost.
• Archers and ranged enemies drop arrows scaled by level, easing your
  ranged ammo cost.
• The undead and demons drop essence.
• Constructs and golems drop coal.
• Nature creatures drop herbs, feeding brewing.
• Every drop, source and rate is listed in the Compendium, both on the enemy's
  page and on the item's page.

🛠️ Quality of Life

• Queue from the skill tabs. Right-click any action or recipe to add it
  straight to your action queue (by count, by level, or by time), on all six
  gathering and all five artisan skills. Auto-starts the queue if it is empty.
• Queue meals too. Recipe-gated meals (Hunter's Stew and friends) can now
  be right-click queued like everything else.
• Sort your bag by type - a new third sort mode next to A-Z and Recent.
• Bug and Feedback forms keep your text. Your draft survives clicking
  away and reopening, and you can now minimise the window to go check something and
  come back to it unchanged.
• The game window remembers its size and position instead of resetting to
  a fixed size every launch (and it will not restore off-screen if you unplug a
  monitor).
• Cartography remembers your collapsed map tiers between visits, and you
  can fold explored maps down (full rows, slim rows, header only) to declutter
  finished areas.
• Tool XP bonuses now show in tooltips on the equipment screen.
• A "Main Menu" button in the bottom bar returns you to the character
  screen, saving on the way out.
• Wolf trap bait changed to Venison (a farmable Deer drop) so trapping
  wolves no longer needs a hard-to-farm woodland seed.
• Bag capacity readout labelled so the slot count is legible.
• The "Untagged" bag filter auto-resets inside custom tabs and restores
  when you leave.
• Outposts "Overview" renamed "Collect" so the entry to the collect-all
  dashboard reads as an action.

☁️ Cloud & Saves

• One active character per session (via the new home screen) makes cloud
  backup and deletion behave predictably.
• Cleaner background cloud backup for your active character.
• Deleting a save is now durable - it clears both locally and in the
  cloud and stays deleted, instead of a stale cloud copy quietly coming back.
• Deleting a character no longer leaves anything behind - a new character
  in that slot starts genuinely fresh, with no inherited levels or gear, and a
  deleted save can no longer be resurrected by autosave.
• Offline progression: menu time counts. Time spent on the home screen or
  after switching character now counts as offline progress.
• Offline progression: your skill resumes when you come back, instead of
  dumping you on a stopped screen.
• Offline progression: honest summary. The "time away" screen shows the
  real time you were gone and tells you when the offline cap trimmed your reward
  (this fixes the "it said 13 hours but only gave 6" confusion - nothing was
  miscalculated, it just was not saying it had capped you).
• Offline progression: clear messaging for skills that cannot earn
  offline (combat, bounty, cartography, agility) instead of a silent blank screen.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed the tablet/rune killing-blow combat freeze (see Combat Rework).
• Fixed the delete-character carryover (see Cloud & Saves).
• Fixed the ice/freeze timing bug and burn leaking between fights
  (see Combat Rework).
• Closed a bounty exploit where a completed wanted boss could be
  re-fought for its guaranteed drops.
• Fixed several level/tool gate mismatches where a mob or resource
  unlocked before the tool or level that was meant to gate it: Crocodile 53 to 55,
  Elk 67 to 70, Dire Wolf 82 to 85, Ancient Bear raised to 99, and the Divine Ore
  Seam map gate now agrees with its mining level.
• Fixed outpost text that wrongly advertised trap unlocks on a smithing
  outpost, and shops that did not exist on the Ancient Forge and Merchant's Cache.
• Corrected item descriptions in both the bag and the Compendium,
  including Cured Scrap (was "No use. Sell it.", now correctly says it is used to
  craft Wolf Leather armour).
• Tooltips and right-click menus now position correctly at 125% UI scale
  and flip to stay on screen.
• The rune / glyph-tablet tab reflows on narrow windows and Steam Deck
  instead of clipping.
• Spell descriptions now state real magnitudes and read "N% chance to..."
  so proc chances cannot be misread (they previously overstated some effects).
• ...and plenty more. This list is already trimmed. Over two weeks there
  were far more fixes, small implementations and under-the-hood changes than this,
  and writing out every single one would make these notes even longer than they
  already are. If it felt off and you mentioned it, chances are it got touched.

🌍 Localization

• A batch of Russian corrections: fixed mistranslated and contaminated
  resource names (Blazefin, Chronofin, cooked crocodile, vials), corrected map
  naming, fixed place names, added missing keys (Parchment, Ink, Raw Beef, the
  Untagged filter, the Feedback button), and replaced an offensive brewing
  phrasing.
• UI overflow fixes for long-word languages: artisan recipe buttons
  across all five crafting views, clipped achievement names (now with a hover
  tooltip), overlapping glyph stock counts, cartography rows spilling off panel, an
  oversized consumed-item minus sign, and a seconds-unit sweep across 12 keys.

🔮 Coming Next

• Full dungeon and raid loot tables with unique endgame gear.
• More Compendium polish, and the rest of the translations.
• More gold sinks and endgame goals.

Thank you for playing, and for two weeks of relentless, brilliant feedback. This
patch is built on it. See you in the realms