Portalborn · public · first seen
Hello everyone!
This is the largest update Portalborn has had since launch, and the first I’m calling a major one. It may not sound like much from a list, but it took a tremendous amount of work under the hood, so to speak. It rebuilds what a generated portal is — every region now has its own creatures, its own shape and its own reason to be chosen — and adds two systems on top of that: going deeper, and reforging the gear you find.
The change list is far heavier than normal. Many of these changes required other changes, which led to still more changes. A short summary comes first; the detail follows below it.
Thank you to everyone who told me plainly that the portals all felt the same. They did. And thank you to everyone who has asked, more than once, for a way to change the stats on gear you’ve already found.
Every generated region has its own monsters. No two regions share one.
Regions now differ in how they’re built — expeditions, circuits, strongholds and sprawls, rolled fresh on most entries, and named when you arrive.
Fifteen regions each have an identity: elites, packs, a second boss, a splitting boss, sealed vaults, roaming creatures, elemental resistance, buried treasure, and a region where everything drops gear.
Clearing a generated portal now offers you a deeper layer. Each one is harder, pays more, and drops rarer gear.
From depth 5, each region’s boss can drop a pet found nowhere else. Fifteen of them.
Dimensional Dust, a new currency, drops from every kill and from dismantling gear.
Enchanter Cedrick has opened a reforging bench in the smithy: reroll, replace or upgrade a stat on gear you’ve found.
Caches stay locked while their guard lives, and three in four hold gear rather than gold.
Hazards now matter, and never kill you.
Elites and bosses pay experience in proportion to the time they take.
Authored gates open on your quest progress instead of a key you carry.
Slick’s lootboxes are off sale while the Parlor is reworked.
Every generated region now has its own creatures, with five new kinds added to finish the job, and every one of them names itself in Chinese on the fight bar — the Lost Maze’s included.
How a region is built has changed too. Three regions have a fixed shape: the Desolate Dunes stretch out as an expedition, the Whispering Swamp loops as a circuit, the Royal Keep is laid out as a stronghold. The other twelve now roll their shape each time you enter, so the same portal can be a winding expedition one visit and a tight circuit the next.
Beyond their shape, each region does something of its own:
Shadow Sanctum is thick with elites, and says so when you arrive.
Sunken Galleon’s crew fights in pairs — start a fight and its packmate joins.
Royal Keep has a second boss, Captain Aldric, holding the inner gate. He drops a pet of his own.
Crystalline Cavity’s guardian splits into two prism shards below half health.
Sunken Temple and Misty Highlands seal a vault: a locked door, its key somewhere else in the zone, an elite waiting inside. The key opens the door once and crumbles when you leave.
Gloomwood Fen drifts — its creatures roam, though nothing hunts you.
Dragon’s Citadel, Frozen Ridge, Astral Spire and Ancient Grove each resist one element. A resisted hit says so.
Desolate Dunes hold the treasure: fewer caches, each paying double.
Void Chasm is tougher, not deadlier — three times the health, the same attack, nearly empty, and a piece of gear from every single kill. The Ledge-Keeper at its entrance will tell you what the place is for.
Whispering Swamp’s poisoned ground pays 25% more for a kill fought inside a hindering ward, and Obsidian Caverns ward every cache room with fire.
Hazards themselves have changed. A ward now costs a share of your own maximum health each round rather than a flat amount, so it means the same thing at every level — and it will never deliver the killing blow.
When you arrive anywhere generated, the game now tells you its shape, how many elites roam it, what it resists, and your deepest clear there.
This is a start rather than a finish. Each region now has one thing that is its own, and a shape that changes between visits — but a region with one identity is still a long way from a place. In much later updates I intend to go considerably further: more of what makes each region itself, and more reason to choose one over another than a single mechanic apiece.
Clear a generated region and you’ll be offered a deeper layer.
Each depth makes every creature 20% stronger than the last, and pays 15% more experience and gold, with rarer gear. The offer states both numbers before you accept. Say no and nothing changes — the return portal stays open. Leave by any route and you begin again at depth 1.
Each deeper layer is built anew: a new layout, new creatures and new hidden stashes, the same size as the layer you just cleared. It announces itself when you arrive, the same way a first entry does.
Going deeper pays in three other ways:
The clear’s box climbs every two depths. A Rare box at depths 1 and 2, Epic at 3 and 4, Legendary at 5 and 6, and a Mythic Overlord Chest from depth 7.
Deep pets. From depth 5, each region’s boss can drop a different pet in place of its usual one, at double the value. There are fifteen to find.
A Wanderer’s Permanent Stat Pill. A clear at depth 2 or deeper can pay one: a 5% chance at depth 2, rising 5% each depth, to a maximum of 50%. The offer tells you the chance.
Your deepest clear in each region is remembered, and named when you return.
The clear summary now shows the run itself: the experience its kills paid, elites slain, secrets found, rooms explored, the box, and the depth.
This one has been asked for for a long time, and it’s the piece I’m happiest to be shipping.
Dimensional Dust drops from every creature you fell beyond a portal — more from elites and bosses, three times as much in the Void Chasm, and 25% more for each depth. Dismantling gear pays it too.
Enchanter Cedrick has set up a reforging bench in the smithy, north and then west of the town square. Bring dust and gold, and you can:
reroll a stat’s value,
replace a stat you don’t want with another,
upgrade a piece’s rarity outright.
Choosing one opens a window showing the stat you have, the range a drop can roll it at, two new results, and what it costs. You can always keep what you have. Every paid choice uses one of that stat’s reforges, and a better piece can be reforged more times — so a great find is still a great find.
A reroll can reach a little past the best a drop of that piece could roll, which is what makes working on a good piece worthwhile. A piece from a hard portal rerolls at its own hard-portal quality, not an ordinary one. A stat fixed by the piece’s design says so, and can’t be rerolled.
A cache is locked while its room’s guard lives. The kill that empties the room tells you it’s free to search.
Three caches in four now hold a piece of gear, one in four gold.
Every ordinary region’s elites can drop a permanent-attribute item, at a 0.5% chance. Each region has its own, and the item tells you what to do with it.
Boss trophies come out right. A trophy that rolled Common was coming out about 5% low. Trophies you already hold keep their numbers.
Elites and bosses now pay in proportion to the time they actually take: an elite 1.6× an ordinary kill, a boss 2.8×. A region’s experience bonus is applied once rather than twice.
Authored gates now open when your quest progress says they should, instead of when you’re carrying a key. The old keys are retired — if your save still holds one, you’ll see a line explaining it’s no longer needed. Old Zhou and Tocksworth no longer offer you a key.
Carrying eight keys for doors that were already open was poor design on my part, and it’s gone.
Slick’s lootboxes are off sale for now. Boxes you already have still open there as before, and portals now hand them out directly — every zone clear pays one, and it climbs with depth.
With that much new loot arriving, plus the reforging bench, the Parlor’s prices no longer make sense against the economy around them. Rather than guess at new numbers, I’d rather rework it properly. Slick is reorganising his stock.
English movement names the direction — “You travel to the EAST” — and the exits line reads “Obvious Exits: West, South, North, East”.
English articles are correct throughout: “an arid mesa”, “a Rare piece”, “an Epic offhand”.
A long-standing naming fault that could print an item’s affix word twice is fixed.
Every generated monster names itself in Chinese on the fight bar, the Lost Maze’s included. As always, Portalborn is fully interactable in Simplified Chinese — the commands work, not only the text.
The reason this update took the shape it did is that generated portals are where most players spend most of their time, and they were the part of the game doing the least work. Fixing that meant changing how regions are built, not adding more of them.
Those changes aren’t Desolate Dunes changes or Void Chasm changes. They’re Portalborn changes — the layout profiles, the region identities, the depth system and the reforging bench all live in the engine, and every portal added from here can use them, including the handcrafted ones.
The reforging bench is a beginning rather than an end. The Token Forge’s costs and the way Slayer Tokens are earned need the same treatment, and the Parlor’s rework is already on the list.
And none of this replaces what’s coming. The Hero Classes are still the game’s next major milestone. This update is part of making the world they’ll be played in worth the time.
Thank you, genuinely, to everyone who reported, suggested, argued with and tested through this. The portal overhaul exists because players told me the portals felt the same, and the reforging bench exists because players asked for it clearly and more than once. I’d much rather hear that than not.
— TheHand
| Depot | New manifest | Previous manifest |
|---|---|---|
| 4815721 | 720294950459853880 | 3784273570735322815 |