tl;dr

• No wipe in early access.

• Daily live events are online, with new cosmetics, mounts and pets to be collected.

• Approx. 30% improvement to dungeon performance and stability.

• Crafting timers reduced massively.

• We fixed some of the connection and loading issues.

We are not wiping your progress at 1.0

Before Early Access launched, we posted that we planned to start version 1.0 fresh and leave Early Access progression behind. The aim was a fair start for everyone at 1.0: equal access to the new content, balance changes, improvements and fixes we're delivering over the coming months, and a fair race to the top for new players.

We've been reading the conversation in Discord, on the Steam forums and in your reviews, and you've told us clearly that you don't want progression wiped at the end of Early Access. Many of you are already 50 to 100 hours into Soulbound: Online after just over two weeks, and there are a lot more hours going into those characters before 1.0. Asking you to hand that back isn't right, and we apologise for this oversight. We should have weighed that more carefully the first time.

We have made the decision not to wipe Early Access at 1.0 launch.

• Characters created in Early Access will persist into 1.0.

• Your progression, items, cosmetics and achievements will not be reset at 1.0 launch.

• You'll be able to keep playing your Early Access character after 1.0 launches.

• You can start building your character now and keep progressing as we add content through Early Access and beyond 1.0.

Listening and building with the community is a core reason we chose Steam Early Access. We'll keep tweaking items, balance and the economy as the game grows, and we're working on how to give players who join us after Early Access a fair and balanced start. We'll share more on that when it's ready.

Your accounts will not be wiped. Your progress will not be reset.

Summary: A wealth of new content, and huge improvements

Dungeon performance gains

We've rebuilt much of the dungeon system to improve performance and reliability. You can expect higher FPS, less stuttering, smoother gameplay and far more accurate hitbox detection. This is ongoing work, so please, give us your feedback so that we can identify what to improve next.

Our benchmark on a i5-10400F + GTX 1650, 16 GB RAM resulted in a 30% improvement to FPS.

Craft Timers have been reduced heavily

After overwhelming feedback we've reduced the high level craft and upgrade timers so that no upgrade exceeds a day.

Live Events - Start collecting the cosmetics, pets and mounts

You can now earn Commission Medals and Credits from taking part in the daily live events. Today, we are launching the fishing and the abyssal raid event. Cast your lines to find those lootboxes at the bottom of the Neo-Tilus Reef and find the exclusive pets and mounts within!

Patch 2: Full patch notes build .5.43.41

Performance & Stability Improvements

Dev note: This patch includes significant client and server-side dungeon performance changes, focused on rendering, entities, ability casts, and relic events under load. Further improvements may follow as we continue testing and profiling.

Dungeon Performance Overhaul

• Significant client-side dungeon performance improvements, focused on reducing frame stutter during heavy action.

• Server-side ability processing has been reworked to reduce the cost of simultaneous casts and relic-triggered events under heavy load. This should improve performance in later dungeon stages and relic-heavy builds.

• The Bomb chain-reaction relic has been changed to avoid runaway chain scenarios that could grind performance to a halt.

• Fixes that shipped alongside the optimization work:

  • Pausing the game no longer causes visual issues with growing abilities.

  • Buff applications that fail no longer retry themselves after you've already left the dungeon.

  • Fixed multi-projectile smart targeting: repeated hits from multi-hit abilities now correctly spread across multiple enemies again, instead of refusing to re-target enemies struck by an earlier hit.

Dungeon Combat Responsiveness

• Hit detection now better matches what you see on screen, reducing "phantom hits" after successfully moving away from an enemy.

• Last-second dodges against enemy contact and projectiles should register more reliably, especially with moderate latency.

• Damage, dodge and block reactions now appear much faster.

• Health updates now appear faster.

• Enemies now track their server position more smoothly, reducing drifting, jitter and sudden snapping.

• Movement correction is now frame-rate independent, improving fast chases and lower-frame-rate gameplay.

Connection & Loading

• Profile loading now has proper timeout and recovery handling, so a single failed request can no longer block your character from spawning indefinitely into the world.

Abilities & Relics

• Celestial Yoku Staff now correctly functions as a Staff ability. (It was misconfigured as a Greatsword ability. It is, in fact, a staff.)

• Tritanium Elemental Pendant was mislabelled as the Voltscale Healer's Pendant; its name has been corrected. Its description has also been updated to clarify that the "+1 additional projectile" bonus applies to Drones only not to all projectiles. (The Drone bonus correctly applies inside dungeons.)

Gear & Items

Gear Stats are Now Actually Visible

Dev note: A cluster of related bugs meant gear could show zero stats, on the ground, in your bag, or even while equipped. In most cases the stats were being applied under the hood, but invisible stats are scary stats. All of the following are fixed:

• Legendary gear now displays its stats correctly when equipped.

• Gear now rolls and saves its stats the moment it's created. Dropped gear shows its full stats on the ground and in your bag immediately so no more "equip it and unequip it to see the numbers" ritual.

• Crafted gear can no longer be created without stats. (Crafting right before maintenance will no longer produce cursed, statless armor.)

Necklaces: Secondary Stat Update

• All 18 core necklaces from Tier 3 through Tier 6 now carry built-in secondary stat packages:

  • T3/T4 necklaces: two Epic-grade secondary stats each.

  • T5/T6 necklaces: three Legendary-grade secondary stats each.

  • The stat pool includes attack speed, critical strike chance/damage, cooldown reduction, health and health regen, healing and shielding power, AoE radius, effect duration, knockback, damage-over-time potency, heavy hit chance, and physical power.

• Fixed several necklaces with incorrect, stale, or missing stat data, including one T6 necklace that had no secondary stats at all.

• Each necklace's signature special effect / legendary effect is unchanged.

Consumables Overhaul

Dev note: Stims and Elixirs had their prohibitive debuffs crossed, Elixirs were locking you out for 60 seconds while Stims locked you out for a full hour. That's now fixed, food sickness no longer outlasts its buff, and high-tier Stims last meaningfully longer.

• Debuff corrections: Elixirs (now correctly apply Infused for 1 hour, instead of Metabolic Shock for 60s):

  • Hive Lord's Elixir

  • Eclipse Elixir

  • Phase Elixir

• Debuff corrections: Stims (now correctly apply Metabolic Shock for 60s, instead of Infused for 1 hour):

  • Data Surge Stim

  • Abyssal Stim

  • Warp Stim

• Food sickness now matches buff duration: you can eat again as soon as your food buff expires:

• Stim durations have also been increased.

Loot & Item Cleanup

• Missing weapon drops added to dungeon loot tables. Each affected dungeon was missing its Sword, Greatsword, Staff, and Heavy (Axe/Hammer) weapon drops for that tier:

  • Collapsing (T4 weapons): Lunar Plateau

  • Shattered (T5 weapons): Everdune, Eastern Reach, Farpoint, Lunar Plateau

  • Abyssal (T6 weapons): Everdune, Eastern Reach, Farpoint, Lunar Plateau

• Rarity cleanup: Improved rarity accuracy across a range of items and recipes, including T5 and T6 gear and their recipes. This isn't a complete fix yet, some rarity inconsistencies remain, and we're continuing to clean them up.

• Removed duplicate T5/T6 tool entries from crafting stations.

• Removed unused duplicate necklace recipes at T3 and T4.

Crafting & Stations

Craft Time Rebalance (T4–T6)

Dev note: Crafting and station upgrade times have been rebalanced across all tiers to smooth out the progression curve and eliminate multi-day wait times. Timers should still feel meaningful, you should feel the weight of crafting endgame gear, without the exponential walls that made T5 and T6 feel punitive rather than prestigious. Everything now lands under 12 hours, with the longest craft in the game (T6 gear) sitting at 6 hours.

• Gear & Weapons:

  • T4: 10 hrs → 2.5 hrs

  • T5: ~2.1 days → 4 hrs

  • T6: ~10.4 days → 6 hrs

  • Progression now follows a flattening curve, each tier is a step up, but the jumps get smaller as you reach endgame.

• Consumables:

  • T5 potions: 2.5 hrs → 45 min

  • T6 potions: 12.5 hrs → 1.5 hrs

  • Yoku transmutes follow the same curve. Consumables are meant to be used and replaced — their craft times now reflect that.

• Tools & Components:

  • T5 intermediate components: normalized to 1 hr

  • T6 components: 1.5 hrs

  • T6 gathering tools: 2 hrs (tools stay slightly longer than components within a tier)

• Station Upgrades: Previously a flat 16 hrs for each of the final levels. Now tiered by progression:

  • Third-to-last level: 2 hrs

  • Second-to-last level: 4 hrs

  • Final level: 6 hrs

• Unchanged: Kitchen, Generator, and all T1–T3 craft time and those curves were already in a healthy spot.

Generators & Power

• Max-level Generator output increased: 180W → 300W. A fully upgraded Generator can now power one of every station at once, with headroom to spare.

• Existing Generators are automatically updated so that placed Generators (including ones previously placed and picked back up) now reflect the new output.

Stations & Apartments

• T5 and T6 Axe & Hammer recipes have been restored to the Weapon Station. All four missing recipes (T5 and T6, both variants) are craftable again.

• Tier 5 and Tier 6 feet armor items are now displayed in the gearforge station and can be crafted.

• Apartment furniture and stations you pick up now stay picked up and no longer reappear when you leave and re-enter your apartment, and no longer block the space they used to occupy.

Gathering, Farming & XP

Farming Fixes

• Fixed seed planting failing when you had valid seeds. A backend inventory bug could create "phantom" item entries when checking your bag. The root cause behind "There is no valid seed in your bag" and "That seed can't be planted right now" errors (and some "unknown error" toasts) when you very much had seeds. Planting now works reliably, and related quest progression behaves correctly.

• Improved error messaging for planting failures leading to fewer generic "unknown error" messages, more useful ones.

Full Bags No Longer Eat Your Loot

• Items gathered from mining and foraging nodes while your bag is full now drop on the ground instead of silently vanishing. Clear a slot and pick them up and this includes rare follower drops.

Tier 5/6 Experience Rates

Dev note: Top-tier activities were awarding little or, in several cases, zero XP. All T5/T6 gathering and crafting activities now correctly award experience, and the rates have been increased across the board.

• Fixed cases where specific T5/T6 node rewards granted no XP at all.

• Large Lockboxes now grant Hacking XP when they reward a Blue Key Drive (previously only Yoku data chunks gave XP).

Farming XP

• Fixed all T5 and/T6 crops awarding zero Farming XP on harvest: Dragon Fruit, Vanilla Orchid, Honeycomb, Starfruit, Cacao Pod, and Void Truffle now pay out properly.

• Reduced T4 harvest XP to keep the curve in check — T4+ Farming XP now scales along a flatter curve:

  • Watermelon: 2,500 → 1,000

  • Coffee: 2,800 → 1,200

  • Tea: 3,200 → 1,500

New Crop Art

• All six T5/T6 crops, Dragon Fruit, Vanilla Orchid, Honeycomb, Starfruit, Cacao Pod, and Void Truffle now have their own dedicated art: new seed packet icons, new crop item icons, and full growth-stage sprites.

Economy & Vendors

• We updated some of the vendor gold values for items.

• T5 and T6 item gold values fixed so that they now sell to vendors for appropriately higher values than T3/T4 items, instead of being straight copies of the lower-tier prices.

Quests, Tasks & Contracts

• Contracts with crafting objectives now complete properly (e.g., Potion Commotion III, Craft 3 Critical Stims, Blades of Trust II, Craft Nanofiber). If you have a contract that's already stuck, abandon it and pick up a fresh one.

• Deploy to Destroy now correctly counts kills made with Blackhole Bomb.

• Blades of Trust V and VI (Lunar Task Board) now function correctly, and the level VI description has been updated to correctly reference Legendary items.

• Seek and Destroy now has a proper start condition so that it unlocks after Vesper's Challenge, instead of being handed to you the moment you start the game.

• Excavation Investigation: the quest marker now points to the correct Chronoterra Outcrop, instead of directing you to a Celestium Outcrop a tier or two above your pay grade.

• Paul's dialogue after Package Deal no longer promises you a Kusarigama, it now reflects the quest's actual rewards.

World & Dungeons

• Stamina regeneration zones added to major hubs: rest up at the Neo-Tilus Sushi Bar and SaLuna to recover stamina quickly. (The Virelda Tavern and The Tired Soul in Arcadia City continue to regenerate stamina as before.)

• Farpoint and Everdune dungeons now have their own themed Relic Rooms, instead of borrowing Virelda's decor. Their Health and Treasure rooms have been visually refreshed too.

• We have removed the pointless level-up at the end of a dungeon. XP collected after defeating the final boss no longer triggers a level-up and upgrade selection when there are no combat rooms left. (Leveling mid-run, with fights still ahead, is unchanged.)

• Relic and buff icons in dungeons are visible again. They'd become so faint they were effectively invisible as a side effect of recent changes, now fixed.

Under the Hood

• We've improved the Inventory & bank handling for better performance. We expect the bag and bank to feel snappier.

• Picking up gold and items should feel faster as part of these backend improvements.

Thanks for playing, reporting bugs, and debugging in Discord with timestamps and videos as it helps us target the most important fixes first.

We are now focusing our efforts on the next content update which will open the doors to the Spectra Raid. So get your gear, and your group ready.

— The SpiderWare Team