Hello Paxians!
After a successful testing period on our Public Test Shard, Arcadia, we're happy to announce that R46 is now live on all shards.
If you want all the detailed changelogs, be sure to check out the patch notes.
/!\\ IMPORTANT NOTE
Please update your graphics drivers to the latest version. Some Unreal Engine 5.6 improvements may not work correctly with outdated drivers.
General notes
This update is mostly focused on improvements and fixes under the hood. Much of the work has gone into addressing long-standing bugs, improving overall stability and performance, and laying the groundwork for faster development.
One of the biggest, though less visible, parts of this update has been the upgrade from Unreal Engine 5.4 to 5.6. This transition brings a wide range of stability, performance, and engine-level improvements, many of which are listed below. While this kind of work is not always immediately noticeable in moment-to-moment gameplay, it is an important step toward improving the game’s overall reliability and helping us move faster in the future.
Several gameplay systems have also been revisited, most notably NPC behavior, which has suffered from several issues that negatively impacted the overall PvE experience, and particularly in dungeons. These updates aim to make encounters more reliable, consistent, and enjoyable overall.
We’ve also updated parts of the interface. These changes are aimed not only at resolving issues you’ve reported, but also at making future content easier to develop and helping us address structural problems that have been slowing development over time.
While this update may not be massive in terms of visible new content, the amount of work behind it has been significant. At the same time, we’ve also been working in parallel on broader gameplay improvements, and we’ll be sharing more about those soon.
One final note before diving into the details: we’ll now use an internal naming convention for small patches. As such, this update is called R46.
Crafting
Charcoal recipe yields updated: 50 Sapwood now produces 50 Charcoal, and 100 Heartwood now produces 100 Heartwood Charcoal.
UI improvements
Party UI: We’ve revamped the Party UI to improve group management. You can now see your online friends and nearby players in a dedicated panel, and invite them to your group in just two clicks.
Emotes and moods are now in a panel rather than a wheel, making content additions easier.
The TAB menu now clearly separates your character information from your account section.
The Redeeming queue has been improved with new filtering and sorting options to make management easier.
New Mail UI to sort, read, and delete your Account Notifications within the game client.
NPC Behavior & Pathfinding
The aggro system has been entirely reviewed and debugged. These changes are aimed at making PvE combat more predictable, readable, and fair by clarifying how NPCs detect players, call for assist, maintain combat, and drop aggro.
NPCs now use distinct vision, hearing, and assist ranges, with clearer rules governing Direct Aggro and Assist Aggro. Players passing near ongoing fights should no longer unintentionally pull enemies unless they actively engage or support players already in combat.
We are especially looking for feedback on edge cases involving walls, verticality, pathing, and adjacent spaces to help us further refine the system.
You can find more details in our article dedicated to Aggro changes.
New decoration and building pieces
We’ve added over 50 new decorative pieces to enrich your buildings, courtyards, and gardens.
Hedge Set: 6 building pieces unlocked by gathering a new resource, Jasmine.
Trellis Set: 20 building pieces unlocked by gathering a new resource, Anatolian Ivy.
A second set of seven Ivy patches called Anatolian Ivies, unlocked by gathering Anatolian Ivy. Note: the previous Ivy set has been renamed “Gallian Ivy” (formerly Climbing Ivy).
Bougainvillea set featuring 2 trees, 2 bushes, and 8 climbing “patches”, unlocked by gathering Bougainvillea.
4 new benches and 1 stone fountain unlocked via skill progression. And 3 statues unlocked by looting a new resource, Glain Neidr, from Lost Souls.
Night Changes
Nights are now darker overall and feature a new star-filled skybox.
Upscalers Upgrade
The update includes the latest AMD FSR 4 with Frame Generation, as well as NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Frame Generation with Reflex, for up to 4X generated frames on supported GPUs.
Unreal 5.6 and the latest FSR and DLSS play along much better than earlier versions, so both image quality and performance are improved from before.
In particular, upscaled graphics are now much crisper than before, so you can enjoy the game with improved performance with no visual degradation.
Engine Upgrade
We've upgraded Pax Dei's underlying engine from Unreal Engine 5.4 to 5.6. While this doesn't introduce new game features, it brings substantial under-the-hood improvements that directly affect your gameplay experience.
Smoother Frame Rates
Lumen lighting runs faster: The global illumination and reflection systems that give PaxDei its realistic lighting have been heavily optimized for hardware ray tracing. Epic specifically targeted consistent 60 fps on current-generation hardware, freeing up CPU budget for gameplay.
Shadow rendering is cheaper: Virtual Shadow Maps now use smarter culling and caching, reducing GPU cost, especially in dense scenes with many buildings and trees.
Nanite geometry is more efficient: The system that renders millions of polygons for our world terrain and architecture now has better instance culling and draw distance management, reducing per-frame cost in crowded areas.
Renderer parallelization: More rendering work is now distributed across CPU cores, reducing single-thread bottlenecks that could cause frame dips.
Less Hitching & Pop-In
Faster world streaming: Entering new areas is smoother. Physics, terrain, and geometry registration can now run asynchronously, preventing spikes when loading new world cells.
Texture and mesh streaming improvements: Parallel processing and caching for texture/mesh streaming reduce visual pop-in as you move through the world.
Reduced memory spikes: GPU memory management for the Nanite streaming pool and virtual textures is now more graceful, avoiding sudden stalls from buffer resizes.
Better Stability
Networking fixes: Numerous crash fixes and improvements to the replication system reduce disconnects and desync, particularly around object destruction, ownership transfers, and server transitions.
Physics solver improvements: Multithreaded collision detection, partial sleeping islands, and improved scene queries make the physics simulation more robust under heavy load (large battles, many players on structures).
Navigation system fixes: Navmesh generation and streaming are more stable, reducing cases where NPCs could path incorrectly after world streaming events.
Memory leak fixes: Multiple memory leaks in rendering (hair/groom streaming, sparse volume textures, GPU scene data) have been resolved, improving long-session stability.
Visual Quality (Automatic)
Sharper reflections: A new reflection denoiser produces cleaner, less ghosted reflections on water, metal, and polished surfaces.
Better global illumination: Lumen's temporal accumulation is more stable, reducing flickering on foliage and fine geometry. Surface cache updates are now distance-driven, keeping nearby lighting more accurate.
Improved Temporal Super Resolution (TSR): Thin geometry, such as foliage and hair, is more stable, with less patch flickering. Banding artifacts from precision limits have been addressed.
Better ambient occlusion: Short-range AO now runs at half resolution with a denoiser, making it twice as fast while maintaining quality.
Network & Server
Lower replication latency: Small objects replicate faster with better bandwidth utilization, benefiting item interactions in populated areas.
More robust object lifecycle: Fixes around async destruction, dormancy flushing, and component replication reduce edge-case desyncs that could affect inventory or building state.
Improved physics networking: Resimulation is optimized, and render interpolation for networked physics is smoother.
These improvements work automatically: no settings changes are needed on your end. If you previously adjusted graphics settings to improve performance, this may be a good time to try raising them again.
Pax vobiscum.
The Mainframe Team