A real job system with four tiers and two mini-games, a library in every city that marks your map, a corner of the screen that finally tells you what to do next, and a notebook you write yourself.
TL;DR
- Jobs are completely new. Four tiers — Errand, Contract, Commission, Charter — on a shared board that refreshes every season. Claim one and it's gone for everyone else.
- Two new mini-games. The Bench asks which materials. The Line asks in what order.
- Contracts finally claim your primed level-ups. The loop priming has been waiting on since it shipped.
- New: a Library in every city. Free lore and hints even after your round ends, plus records that light a tile on your map worth walking to.
- The archive won't send you somewhere that kills you. It reads each tile's real hazards and enemies against your Survival and Combat first.
- New: Objectives HUD and Journal. The top-left corner now always shows the next step of what you're tracking — and there's a parchment notebook you write yourself that saves with your game.
- Trading rebuilt. A fairness figure on every offer, and five real bugs fixed — including one where item trades delivered nothing.
- The end screen became a proper post-match report. Four tabs, lead changes pinned, and the closest stretch of the game called out.
- Those aptitude tabs are buttons. You said they looked like labels. You were right.
- Plus a teleport that stranded you in caves, a multiplayer trader only one player could see, and "Embue" is finally spelled Imbue.
The Job Board
The old "jobs" are gone. What replaced them is one system with four tiers, where the tier decides the shape of the work and your skill decides the flavour.
- Errand (skill 0-12) — an hour's work inside the walls. Walk to the recruiter's door, then run a timed round trip through the city streets. You steer.
- Contract (4-12) — a signed job that takes you out of town. Collect a consignment, travel, do one activity, report back.
- Commission (8-12) — guild-grade work, wider world, and its own mini-game on site.
- Charter (12) — a sealed charter into dangerous country, with a real encounter waiting.
The board is shared and seasonal. Four to seven postings per city, around 77 across the world, all published at once when the season turns. A posting someone else claims is a posting you can't have. That five-round window is deliberate — a board that turned over faster was unreadable, because you can only see it by standing in the city.
Travel jobs are riders, not detours. A Contract that forces a dedicated round trip pays about 1 coin per action, and nobody sane takes that. Clipped onto a trip you were already making, it pays three to five times better. They're priced for the second case, so plan your season around the board rather than the other way round.
The Errand's danger is the clock, not a dice roll. Deliver on time for coins, run it well for more, miss the shift and get nothing — and the action is spent either way. Higher skill buys you a longer deadline and wider windows. It never makes the run harder.
Contract and above claim a primed rank. If you've trained with a Master and your skill is sitting primed, finishing one of these graded well is what banks the level-up.
Two new mini-games
- The Bench (Contract) is a knapsack. From what you're carrying, pick the right materials for the job.
- The Line (Commission) is a build order. Same ten skill vocabularies, but now it matters what sequence you work in.
Everyone sees the same puzzle — they're generated from the same shared seed, so there's no luck advantage in multiplayer.
Demetry knows more instead of paying more
Demetry's job bonus used to be coin. Now it's information: Demetry sees all fourteen boards where everyone else sees only their neighbours, and can claim remotely once per round.
Every city has a Library
Not the Grand Library in Benfriege — that one teaches you skills, and it hasn't changed. The city archive tells you about the country around it. It never gives you a skill level, an item, or a victory point.
Three shelves:
- Lore and Hints cost nothing at all. No action, no energy, and they stay open after your round has ended — so read them while you're waiting. The first thing you read in each city each round teaches you a little something, which makes visiting a new city's archive worth the walk. Every city has its own archive, its own name, and its own six passages.
- Records costs a minor action, once per round, and turns up a lead: one tile lit yellow-green on your map, worth going to.
Five kinds of lead: a Coin Cache, Rich Ground (better excavating and gathering there), Strange Energy (a magic sword fragment may be sleeping), a Proving Ground (bonus combat XP for winning there), or a Field Study (bonus skill XP). You can carry three, no two alike.
The record names the kind of find, never the place. Your Critical Thinking sets the grade, not whether you succeed — a poor reading still leaves with a lead, so the action is never wasted. A better grade pays more and puts the tile closer.
It won't send you somewhere that kills you. Before pointing at a tile, the archive checks that tile's real hazards and enemies against your Survival and Combat. Ruins want Survival 6 and Combat 35. The wilderness wants Combat 50. At Survival 6 and Combat 50 the whole map opens up — a gate that only ever tightened would be the feature closing down exactly as you got good at the game.
Coins are the way out, never the prize. There's no way to drop a lead from the archive. Walk to the tile and Salvage the Site: take a handful of coins and lose the lead. The card names what you're about to destroy before you click, and salvaging always pays less than following the lead would have.
Benfriege's reading room is special. As the Grand Library's public shelf, it's the only archive that offers you two tiles and lets you choose. Information, not power. And carrying a book you borrowed from the Grand Library upstairs makes every archive in the realm read better for you.
The corner of your screen finally says something
The old quest and boost corner is gone. In its place: a rail that's always on, with labelled Quests and Boosts pills carrying live counts — and underneath them, one line of text showing the next step of whatever you're tracking.
That line is the point. There is now always a sentence in the corner telling you what to do.
Click a pill and a drawer slides open: icon, name, next step, and a status chip with the number that matters — 3 rd, 2/4, GO. Hover a row for the full text, the location, and two buttons: Show on Map and Pin to Journal.
The Journal is new: a parchment page where you write and edit your own notes, and they save with your game. Press N or J. Pin an objective to it and the title comes across so you can write your own plan underneath.
Q opens quests, B opens boosts, and the bag moved to I.
Trading, rebuilt
The player-to-player trade page is new from the ground up.
- A fairness figure on the offer, so you can see at a glance whether the deal is lopsided. It's the quick-sell value — the same number your bag shows — so the two can never disagree.
- Your free bag space is checked before you can Accept, not after.
- An offer can't settle against a state that has moved. If either side changes something, a stale acceptance is rejected rather than quietly going through.
- Both heroes now render at a consistent size instead of one being nearly three times the width of the other.
Five real bugs died here, all of them older than this release. The worst: item trades delivered nothing at all — coins worked, items silently vanished. Also fixed: a typo that left you permanently flagged as "trading", retracting an offer dropping back to English, and iron, sand and beads being labelled "no quick-sell value" when they simply sell for a low price.
The end of the game is worth reading now
The end screen was one chart. It's now four tabs of proper post-match analysis, led by The Race — everyone's victory points over every round, on one shared scale, with gold pins at every lead change and a shaded band over the closest stretch of the whole match. Players who were never really in it are drawn dimmer, so the actual duel reads first.
Interface
- The aptitude tabs look like tabs now. You told us: "new users have no clue it's clickable — they think they are just labels." Six detail screens were sitting behind a control most players never found. They now have gaps, rounded tops, a raised edge, and only the selected one shows in full colour.
- The game opens on the VP panel instead of your bag. It answers "how am I doing and what am I aiming at", which is the question you actually have between turns.
- Clicking the VP tab while you're already in an aptitude screen takes you back to the overview. Previously the only ways out were the tab you came in through or the V key — both of which you had to already know about.
- The Knowledge screen stops sending you to trainers who'd turn you away. Once you're past level 8, an Adept can't teach you anything, so it now shows only the Master locations. Past 12 it tells you plainly that nobody can take you further.
Bug fixes
- Teleporting out of a cave or off a mountain used to strand you. You'd arrive somewhere new still counted as being underground, and there was no way back up — the game refused every move and only cave menus offered an Ascend. Fixed for teleport tablets, being kicked out of a city after recovery, and being pulled into a fight.
- A trader in a multiplayer city only existed for one player.
- Overlays no longer leak your clicks to the map underneath. Reported by a player: Journal open over the board, clicked inside the page, and their piece teleported to the tile behind the parchment — onto one that killed them. Both the Journal and the objectives HUD now hold onto their own clicks properly.
- Pafiz's round-end handling, and the missing odds pill when hiring a worker.
- "Embue" is now "Imbue" everywhere — the tablet, the prompts, the button, and the icon.
See you out on the road.