Gargadusa's Tower · beta · first seen
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A new game now opens on a seven-beat cinematic: the epigraph, the empty hall Oaken Ort left you, his letter with the real inheritance ledger, the naming of your guild, the Great Sage on Hiltcrest, Chapter One of The Shield of Hiltcrest, and the founding itself — replacing the three separate overlays that used to stack up before you could play.
Sim or Watch your own bracket match and a box score opens: every fighter's damage, damage taken, healing and knockouts, an MVP badge, a wounded mark, and a damage-share bar — the same columns your quest and tower reports use.
Best-of-three ties now carry a scoreboard: one pip per leg above the bracket, filled leg by leg as you watch, and again on the box score when the tie settles.
A pop-up three weeks before each festival warns you when you have named nobody, tells you exactly which week the rolls seal, and takes you to the Registry. It can be turned off in Settings ▸ Gameplay.
Missing the seal no longer means missing the festival. The Registry and the rules screen now say plainly that an unnamed roster auto-fills and your guild still competes — you simply do not choose who fights.
If you would rather sit a festival out, the reminder offers to abandon it outright: no entry, no placement, no penalty, and a feed line saying so.
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Every hero you field in a festival match gains +2 morale, win or lose — being chosen for the lists is felt. Winners still take the larger +5 surge on top.
The fielded side that takes a Crown Cup League festival earns the Festival Champion badge, a permanent record trait with no stat effect. It's just nice to be recognized.
The Shining Star who arrives at the Observatory is now genuinely S-Tier: their per-category potentials, growth ceilings and starting stats all roll at S-Tier instead of the headline claiming a rank the badges contradicted. Existing Shining Stars on your roster are repaired on load — earned stats are kept, only the growth ceilings are regenerated.
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On higher Injury Rate settings the difficulty wear-and-tear roll now weighs each raider by how much health they actually lost, so a hero who ended a clean victory at full health can no longer turn up in the injury list while the one who bled walks away clean.
The Deploy button can no longer be pushed off-screen. The teammate-variety advice now starts collapsed behind a one-line summary, the deploy panel scrolls when it runs tall, and Deploy stays pinned to the bottom of it.
A league no longer softlocks at the Spring Festival. A server-fought tournament is adopted as the resolved bracket it is, instead of raising an "Enter the Lists" prompt over it that nothing could dismiss and that pinned Ready at "Blocked: cclEvent" for every player in the league.
The Squad Registry no longer stalls when you build a deep reserve list. Chemistry and synergy previews are computed once per candidate instead of on every keystroke and every add.
The box score's "wounded" mark now names who actually left hurt, rather than everyone who went down during the fight.
A building upgraded from Masterwork to a lower-rolled tier no longer keeps claiming "Masterwork Construction" while running on the tier's real quality — the badge reads the current tier's build.
That same building can be renovated again. The reroll prompt used to hide on anything that had ever been Masterwork, which left a downgraded tier stuck with no way out.
The renovation prompt names the right quality on a building that has had a shoddy repair, instead of reading the repair marker as the tier's build.
On macOS the game no longer randomly asks for microphone access over the main menu. The sound system is built on your first click now, and with sound effects turned off it is never built at all.
The native Linux build launches on stock Ubuntu 24.04 and on distributions that restrict user namespaces. Every Linux startup fix the game carries now actually reaches the command line, through the Steam depot and the AppImage alike.
The Linux .deb install launches from the command line as well as the desktop entry.
Desktop builds move to a much newer browser engine, which is what addresses the "slideshow that no setting could fix" on recent NVIDIA drivers.
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Overall ratings on the placement board are bigger and colored by strength — gold at 75 and above, green from 60, the usual bone through the middle, dim below 45 — so you can find your strongest tanks for the front line at a glance instead of reading every token.
Identical enemy clones collapse into one row on the damage rail ("Marauder ×10") instead of ten copy-paste lines; the number is that unit's total, and hovering says so.
The red enrage wash that floods the arena once a match passes its enrage round is now actually visible — it was measurably invisible at its old strength.
The trade ledger's single "Value" sort splits into Best deal (market-value ratio) and Most gold (net gold gained), on both the All Offers ledger and each guild's incoming list.
Every incoming material row now shows its deal-quality badge and its net gold, so the ordering is legible on the row itself rather than something you have to derive.
Material trade cards show a net figure beside the in/out split.
Upgrade advice can be filtered by crafter. Pick one and the panel switches to that crafter's full list of buildable upgrades — including the ones a spare item or another profession was quietly beating.
Heroes out on a quest or raid now appear in upgrade advice: you can plan what to build for them while they're away, with the equip row shown but disabled and its reason given.
The recruit board tells you why you never see high-rank crafters and staff: B-Tier applicants from Guild Tier 3, A- and S-Tier from Tier 5, with A-Tier also wanting 500 renown.
Force GPU Acceleration — a new switch for boxes whose graphics driver is on the engine's blocklist, so filter-heavy views stop rasterising on the CPU. Works on native Linux and under Proton, and turns itself back off if the game then fails to open.
Display Backend — the old Force X11 switch becomes a three-way choice: automatic, force X11/XWayland, or native Wayland.
Launch Diagnostics — a card in Settings ▸ Display that copies a one-paste report of your display server, graphics driver, whether the game got GPU acceleration, and any launch errors. Home folder paths are masked out.
The hardware-acceleration toggle now says what it can and cannot do: it turns acceleration off, it cannot turn your GPU on.
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House Valorheim's patriarch is Roderick Valorheim. There is one Aldric in Hiltcrest, and he is Ser Aldric Thorne.
The Crown's quest-giver is Lord Regent Cassian Marlowe, a distinct office above Thorne's District Overseer rather than a second Aldric wearing his face. Existing saves update both names on load.
| Depot | New manifest | Previous manifest |
|---|---|---|
| 4377371 | 6530614326255017679 | 3455010993866890652 |
| 4377372 | 8690568975857580664 | 8927092315022235980 |
| 4377373 | 4178237679535822718 | 6808560736707058910 |