Hello mates, Baron here and today I am going to be showing you what's to come in the first of the free Byeth Updates: The Rakta Update.
As mentioned in other news, The Byeth Updates are a series of free content updates from now until the end of 2026, adding lore-canon weapons, armour and some small features to the sandbox and crystal hunt gamemodes.
For this update, the focus was Rakta. Rakta is an amalgamation of East Asian cultures, so this was the design inspiration for the team.
Now let's get into what is included.
New Weapons
Let's cut right to the chase... you all knew it was destined to happen... You know it, you love it -
How could there not be the classic katana! ːlunar2019piginablanketː
After dozens of mods, you can now finally say the katana is officially canon in the universe of Blade & Sorcery.
Next, for some thrown weapon variety, one of the featured weapons being added are throwing shurikens!
You may have noticed a limitation in Blade & Sorcery where throwing things feels a lot more like "pushing away with telekinesis" versus how you might expect a thrown weapon to work in real life. This was always just a limitation with the way the physics work in the game, so thrown weapons in Blade & Sorcery kind of shot forward like Magneto pushing a dagger rather than spinning like a throwing axe.
However, with a little bit of dev trickery the shuriken is different in that it actually throws and actually spins!
It's also designed to be as little finicky as possible, so that the blade actually penetrates and doesn't just bounce off the enemies.
In smaller one-handed weapons, the team added some dagger-like sai and kama inspired weapons.
The kama is particularly unusual for Blade & Sorcery, as curved weapons is not something we generally add due to the complexities of the colliders.
Meanwhile, in terms of large weapons the team went for a kanabo design to add a nice meaty blunt weapon into the game.
For polearms, the inspiration was a guandao type glaive.
The team also took inspiration from some more interesting weapon designs -
Check out this unusual zhanmadao-inspired weapon.
Finally, with the Raike being highly magical warriors, we wanted to add something a bit interesting for their magical category.
The team came up with a cool concept for a Raike staff that is a dual-crystal bo-staff, capable of being imbued on both ends to wreak absolute havoc.
You can fire each end independently and even mix-match elements!
Armour
As well as weapons, there will be a brand new Raike armour to go along with the Rakta update.
Unfortunately I don't have any previews that show the final product as it is still under development, but I should have something ready for the next news.
Stay tuned!
Achievements
And now, a little surprise feature: Achievements will be added to the Rakta update! ːsteamsunnyː
As opposed to the typical "grind to unlock" or "just play the game" type achievements, we tried to do something a bit more engaging with ours and turned a part of it into little scavenger hunt of sorts.
You will still have a few "collect all xyz" type unlocks, but for most of our achievements we made them more easter-eggy, Players will not know the secret conditions of the unlocks, so you will have to play around, experiment, and try uncover hidden things to discover them.
We set the conditions to be things that B&S fans will have an edge in knowing, either because they are long running community gags or they are classic B&S easter eggs.
Can you find them all? ːpraisesunː
Release Date
The team are still bugfixing the update, and despite the appearance that it might be nearly ready, in reality some of the weapons still have big issues like collider issues and phasing due to their thin design.
As such, we are really reluctant to give a solid release date because you never know how smoothly or not smoothly bugfixing will go. That said, we are feeling okay about giving a ballpark for now, and that ballpark is an October release.
I will be able to confirm an exact date the closer we get to a release.
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That's it for the Rakta news today, folks!