Gargadusa's Tower · beta · first seen
Every new game deals its 31 rival guilds from a bench of 131 leaders, so you will rarely face the same District twice in a row. Each leader has a new inked portrait and zodiac parameters.
Every leader has fixed sun and moon signs. The sun sets their strategy in a steady year: how hard they quest and raid, how they trade, whether they poach and how they treat you. The moon sets how they react under strain.
Rivals now feel pressure. Deaths, failed raids, lost places, empty coffers and losses to you build strain. A rival under enough of it turns Stung or Breaking and plays its moon's response.
Guilds can now close for good. A guild that stays Collapsed and Breaking through a full Last Season folds: its best heroes reach your Recruit board, its banner goes on the new Fallen Banners page and a few weeks later a new guild takes the empty seat. Folds are rare and never come before Year 3. Your nemesis can fold too; that counts as your win.
Leaders have lives. They are tied to one another as kin, mentors or rivals, so feuding guilds clash and friendly ones trade or send aid. They age, retire and hand their guild to a successor.
Rival leaders now write to you at the moments that matter: when you poach one of their heroes, when one of you beats the other, when they climb past you or when they enter their Last Season. At most one rival letter arrives a month and your nemesis writes first.
A rival's profile gains a Leader tab with their signs, ties and history. Your scouts reveal more of their game: their doctrine at any Scouting Post, their mood at tier 2 and next season's plan at tier 3. A new District page under Rankings shows all 31 seats and the ties between them.
Existing saves keep their 31 guilds and join the new rules on load, with each leader's signs set to their authored ones. Leagues founded from this update on run Rivals 2 on the league server. Leagues founded before it keep playing as they did.
Beating the Tower now offers Begin Again beside Stay in Hiltcrest. It opens a New Game+ ceremony in four parts: The Call, Who Walks Back, The Blessing and The Terms.
Pick any five heroes to carry over, not just one party. Name their captain. Bring a chest of up to five stored items. Every piece your veterans carry arrives re-forged at full durability. The terms default to your last run's and a "What you keep" ledger replaces the old warning.
The setup offers your old guild's buildings as worn starting halls.
A New Game+ intro now tells the story of your own return: a Generation card, your five standing in the hall and a letter from the Great Sage that remembers the run behind you, from the years you held to who didn't come back. The Guild Hall keeps a lineage strip with one line per finished run.
New Game+ runs get their own Return Tasks in place of the Founding Tasks they used to skip. Finishing them opens the Growth Tasks and Desk Lessons a fresh game gets. Each blessing now shows a category, a fit mark and a "Best when" hint.
Old Debts: while your returning veterans are far ahead of your Crown license, the board posts veteran-only quests at their level so they can earn rebuild money instead of running starter contracts. A party needs three returning veterans and the quests taper off as your license catches up.
NOTE: Many more changes are coming to this system. The above really is the first step in cleaning up what was one of the earilest systems in the game.
A layer bar now guides the UX of the War Table. Each layer partitions the whole frontier: the map shades every region by it and the side rail lists every region with the actions from its panel.
Patrols shows captains and empty posts with Station and Recall. Gatherers shows goods and lets you send or call home a gatherer. Rivals shows who holds each region, how your presence compares with the rival to beat and how that changed over the last week.
Supply shows running supply lines with the next delivery and each region's yield. Outposts shows tiers and build weeks with raise and upgrade. Quests shows each region's open quests and raids, flags work ending within two weeks, marks newly posted work and offers a "List these quests" shortcut.
Terrain filter shows just the painted land with every mark cleared away.
Shift plus a number picks a layer. On the iPad Desk the layer bar replaces the old lens switch. The Sage's War Table page explains it all.
Two new themes join the Appearance: Midnight (cool blue-slate with cream text) and High Clarity (true black with white text, a yellow accent and a colorblind-friendly green).
Font picks now reach all the text in the Dossier theme. The accent slider fully recolors CleanOS and says where it doesn't apply. The window stays in step when you change the theme or Text Size from Settings.
Escape now closes the dialog on top instead of the Appearance window behind it.
A custom font keeps the built-in Chinese and Japanese fonts and the emoji fallback, so that text no longer drops to the system font and emoji no longer draw as boxes on Linux and Steam Deck. The Italic pick now also reaches board italics, the Talk Result feud line and the Week Ledger.
Gray text in the default CleanOS theme is brighter and easier to read. (Reported on the Steam forums.)
More moments play on the ceremony paper (in both light and dark modes). Staff hires, contract extensions and trade arrivals use the signing page with ink portraits of everyone involved. A faction oath presses the faction's own wax with its leader's face. The Severance epilogue plays in the victory room at night and Game Over strikes your guild from its Crown charter.
The first-hour task cards are now short notes from the Great Sage.
In a league the Crown Cup result crowns the champion with its leader's portrait and every rival row shows its leader's face.
About 200 more ink hero portraits join the pool across every race.
The Portrait tab gains a gender switch beside Race. Flip it to browse the other pool and press Keep to change the hero's face and gender together. Restore original brings back both. The change follows the hero into retirement as staff and through trades.
The Portrait tab offers many more faces: a hero's own face and faces worn by guildmates no longer go missing from the grid, See them all or Favorites. Elf women went from about 10 choices to about 30. A face one hero gives up can now go to another hero of the same race, gender and age.
"Pair with a guildmate" now opens the Talk Table, a full-screen picker with every guildmate as a card: your tie, the payoff, the party chemistry gain, their sun aspect and a topic. Click to pick, press and hold to seal and a short tavern scene plays out the result. Guildmates who can't talk right now are dimmed with the reason.
Hazard tiles now show each battleground's own painted lava, fast water, scree or mud instead of the same flat pool. Hazard strength still reads from the tile's rim.
On the tilted board each battleground's painted backdrop now shows as a horizon behind the table. On tall screens the backdrop keeps its scene centered.
Watching a quest's battle replay now draws the quest's own battleground instead of a bare board.
Party member bars now show each hero's attack types beside their class. A type boosted by an active party synergy lights up and its tooltip shows the boost.
The Parties tab search now queries heroes: type a name to find the party they lead or ride with. A search with no match says "No parties match" and the availability strip dims the parties it filtered out.
The Registry's Class, Level, Age and Race headers now show tooltips like their neighbors.
Age filters no longer hide young Orcs and Goblins or old Elves and Dwarves at their ends, which now read "18 or younger" and "50+".
The Renew tooltip now says a re-sign only happens if the hero is willing and the price fits your budget.
Rival guilds can no longer sign a season's new arrivals in the same week they appear, before you've had a look. A rival's emergency recruiting also leaves a newcomer alone for their first 13 weeks.
When rivals sign free agents at the start of a season, the Live Feed posts one summary of how many they took by potential tier, naming the ones your scouts knew. A rival's short-term signing now shows only what your scouts know of the hero.
Your materials now show their refinement grade (Fine and up) on the Markets stock list and in each material's header. A tooltip explains that a refine sets the grade of the whole stack and better grades raise crafted gear quality.
Trade builder: each material you pick now labels its two prices, such as "Market 95g → Trade ~81g/u", so it's clear what each number means.
New pages: "How Do I Train My Staff?", Challenge Runs and The Four Tournaments. The Markets pages now describe today's tabs, the Crown Cup page names the festivals and the sixteen-guild Cup and the Treasurer page lists the real rank ladder with each rank's sale bonus and order count.
The first-visit CCL guide describes the tab as it is today, all ten tabs. With Disable CCL Events on it no longer promises a week 51 Crown Cup.
Painted faction crests replace the emoji in the Factions intro and locked-feature rows show the building's own art. Locked-feature cards and several headers follow your Icon Style setting.
Title menu: BACK stays pinned at the bottom of long pages like Options and Load Game. Escape leaves any sub-screen.
Standing orders now need only a War Room. The party Focus panel no longer also asks for a hired Tactician. A Tactician still adds the full order sheet and their judgment.
Sanctum Meditation always picks a stat that still has room to grow, so a roll is never wasted on a capped stat.
A crafter away at a seminar no longer refines materials. The quick-craft buttons say a Cook or Alchemist is needed when your only one is away.
Staff life stages use the same age brackets as heroes of their race again. A hero who absorbed the Grimoire of Endurance now shows the right life stage.
The Epic Knight's Indomitable and its Legendary twin Aegis of the Absolute now say "invincible for one battle" instead of a number of seconds. They work the same as before.
Losing a World Boss fight no longer ends on "The Tower Holds". World Boss battles have their own victory and defeat titles. The sortie forecast's risk word now matches the outcome beside it.
Tower Muster: "Call up the best parties" now honors Deployable only and no longer seats injured, resting or away heroes.
Armory: "Worn by" turns green only when the hero can actually equip the piece. A piece the hero is already wearing is no longer dimmed.
The welcome page for a hero bought in a trade shows their own portrait and race.
The quest board's Promised tag no longer appears on a job that would return after the promise's deadline. Celebratory rival raid lines only appear when the raid came home without losses.
Crossroads no longer lists Legend roads a hero can never reach.
Hero card tabs on the Parchment look no longer cut their labels in long languages or at large Text Size.
In the Portrait tab a face another hero wears no longer stretches its tile. The current-portrait frame shows the custom folder art a hero is actually wearing.
On browser saves the custom portrait album now has a size limit and says so when it's full, instead of the save quietly growing.
Quests on your board that featured the Unclaimed keep an enemy on load: a Stitched Thrall stands in until the Unclaimed returns with its art.
Rival letters no longer read "The The River Hilt frontier".
Field Dispatch shows the party name on the level-up card after a raid. Ceremony titles keep their bold type on themed pages.
Headhunts under Humans Only no longer name a race your guild can't recruit.
Meditation gains now post under Training Completions, so hiding Guild Life lines no longer hides them.
The CCL Loadout counts standing-order slots the same way the league server does. It no longer credits a Tactician the league doesn't use. A War Room damaged by a siege or breach holds no orders in league matches.
The load-failure and crash screens now appear your chosen language.
Hero and staff names use your language's name table on every screen. Before, some screens showed Cyrillic names while others showed English. A Cyrillic first name you type still gets a translated surname.
Now translated: the new-game intro's Sage aside and Chapter One excerpt, the game mode names on the New Game, league and New Game+ screens, refinement grade names, the Contracts tab's busy label, a scouted instructor's role, Visitation creature names and the World Boss departure letter.
Traditional Chinese: about 55 lines that read "taxi" where they meant morale or soldiers are fixed, along with other mistaken conversions. Rival signings read 簽走.
Korean and Russian: story characters' names now read the same alone, in full and on the roster. Random recruits no longer share a story character's name spelling. The same fix covers Japanese recruit names.
French: the New Game+ blessings read in one consistent voice.
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