News · Embershard

Work posted at the tavern

September 13, 2026 · 08:09

Taverns have something to do in them now. Walk into one and it posts three notices: kill so many of something, come back, get paid.

Three new camps carry boards into zones no board reached, and each is somewhere to wake up as well.

New characters start rather better off: a purse that covers a first set of gear, a vendor at every workbench, and a page that says where to go and what to make.

Contracts

Every tavern posts three notices — one melee, one ranged, one magic — naming a monster and a number
You carry one at a time, and the three on a board stand until you finish one
A board carries work from the zones within three steps of it, so harder notices are posted further out
It asks for 15 kills of something at your own level, or 50 of something further below it
It pays half of the coins those kills already paid, on top of the coins themselves
Every fifth contract you finish pays double
Any kill counts, and it counts from the moment you take the work
Hand in at any tavern. Abandoning one costs nothing but your streak
Contracts pay coins and no experience, in any skill
Bosses are not posted

Three new camps

Rushlight, east of Gloamfen — the first tavern below level 20 that is not Lucerna
Lanternfell, north of Cairnfell
Tallowhearth, inside the castle walls off The Ashen Bailey
A tavern, a vendor and a bank door at each. No workbench: a camp outfits, it does not make
Their vendors sell the first-rung potion, like every other vendor. Everything stronger is still brewed
Every zone in the game is now within reach of a board, and of somewhere to wake up

Starting out

A new character wakes with 100 coins, which covers the workbench fees for a first set of gear and a potion with it
The zone page says where to gather and where to make a first weapon, and stops saying it once there is one in hand
A place with nothing to fight and nothing to dig points at the nearest place that has some, up to level 10

Vendors

Ironspire, Silvenwood, Aldenfield and Candlemere have one now, so every workbench has somewhere beside it to buy potions and sell what you have no use for

The reference

How contracts work, beside How combat works, with every number the game pays out by
Materials say what one is worth rather than what a gather pays, and the page says how the two meet

Balance

Monsters no longer drop healing potions. Potions are bought or brewed

Fixed

Standing in the tavern you already wake at offered to claim it, and said doing so would cost you it
The vendor trash section had a trophy's price wrong. One is worth a little more than the monster's coins average, and drops on one kill in five

Something worth selling

September 11, 2026 · 19:10

Every monster now drops one worthless thing, and worthless is the point: a trophy is not an ingredient, not a reagent, and not something to wear. It is there to be sold.

A vendor will take the lot in one press.

Vendor trash

Every monster now drops one thing nothing in the game wants, on about one kill in five
A trophy sells for a little more than the monster's coins average, and drops on one kill in five — so coins from fighting are up about a quarter everywhere
Sixty-four of them, one per monster — a goblin ear, a badger claw, a sheared hinge-pin
They stack, so a bagful of one kind costs a single inventory slot
They go in the bank and they can be listed on the auction house, like anything else
The goblin ear is the goblin's trophy now: it falls less often than it did, and is worth 5 coins instead of 3
Nothing else that drops has changed, and no drop rate has moved

At a vendor

Sell all vendor trash, at the foot of the list of what they will buy, with the count and what it is worth

Bosses

The Iron Fletcher was paying an ordinary level 80 monster's coins. Its purse is 490–914, up from 192–365
Its trophy, the Fletcher's iron thimble, is worth 878 coins

The reference

A Vendor trash section on the index, cheapest first
A monster's page lists its trophy and how often it drops, beside its loot table
A trophy's page says which monster gives it up

Enchanting

September 10, 2026 · 15:08

Enchanting is in, and it has two halves that work in opposite directions: breaking gear down earns the level, and working an enchant into something spends it.

Breaking gear down no longer gives back ore, hide, cloth, wood or herbs. It gives back dust, essence and shards, and those are what enchanting spends. Which of the three tiers you get is decided by the level of the piece you broke.

Nothing in your bag or your bank has changed. Materials you have already recovered are still materials.

Enchanting

Enchanting is in: twelve enchants across three tiers, at enchanting 8 to 96
Lesser, Greater and Superior protection add 5%, 10% and 15% to a piece's armour and health
Lesser, Greater and Superior drain heal 1%, 2% and 3% of your maximum health on the blow that kills something
The drain heals the same amount whether you are full or nearly dead, never past full, and never on the blow that kills you
Enchants go on weapons, helms, chest pieces and boots; rings and necklaces take none
Working an enchant into a piece binds it to you: it can no longer be sold on the auction house
A vendor still buys a bound piece, at its ordinary price, and the enchant is lost with it
Replacing an enchant is allowed and does not return the old one's reagents
Enchanting is done at the bench in Candlemere; breaking things down can still be done anywhere

Breaking down

Breaking gear down now returns enchanting reagents instead of a share of the materials it was made from
Crafted gear returns dust, gear that dropped off a monster returns essence, and rings and necklaces return shards
Which of the three tiers you get is decided by the level of the item you broke
A break returns one to three of a single reagent
Breaking something down now pays a share of what its recipe pays to make it, so a greatsword is worth more to take apart than boots
Every piece of gear can now be broken down; a few drop-only pieces could not before
What a break returns always fits, so nothing is lost to a full bag any more

New places

Candlemere, north of Lucerna — the enchanting bench and a bank door, no tavern and nothing to fight

New items

Nine reagents: chalk, murk and gloom dust; guttering, umbral and sundered essence; pale, riven and wyrd shards

Elsewhere

The bag, the vault and the worn screen say what has been worked into a piece
The reference has a page for the enchanting ladder, and a reagent's page says which enchants want it
The queue control is hidden in towns where there is nothing to queue

What a thing is worth

September 03, 2026 · 20:30

Vendor prices and workbench fees on the first three rungs have been brought onto the rule the rest of the ladder follows: a piece of gear sells for a flat rate per point of stat, and the workbench charges half of that.

Rung two has gone up, rung three has come down, and rung one is unchanged. Nothing about fighting, gathering or crafting XP has moved.

Vendor prices

Gear of the same rung now sells for the same price whichever trade made it
Rung two gear sells for roughly three times what it did
Rung three gear sells for roughly a third less than it did
Rungs four and up are unchanged, apart from a few coins of rounding
Rung one is unchanged
Boss jewellery keeps its premium and is unchanged

Workbench fees

The fee is now half what the piece sells for, at every rung above the first
Rung two fees are roughly half again what they were
Rung three fees for boots and helms are lower; chest and weapon fees are higher
Rung one fees are unchanged

Breaking down

Wallow plate now breaks down into four blacksteel ore instead of five, matching the stalker's jerkin and the shaman's wrap

A tidier place to shop, and to read

September 01, 2026 · 17:40

Some improvements to the auction house, to crafting stations, to profiles, and to the reference — the last of which had been alphabetising the ore ladder, which is no ladder at all.

Crafting stations had grown to forty recipes apiece, in one unbroken column from the first rung to the tenth. There is a box to search that now, and a checkbox to put what your trade cannot reach yet out of sight.

The auction house

You can now choose how many items to buy from a lot, rather than having to buy all of it
Buying asks you to confirm, and the confirmation says the quantity and the total price
Your own listings are now in a section of their own, separate from what other players are selling
The recent average price now sits on its own line under each lot

Profiles

A player's profile now shows what they are wearing, above their stats

The reference

Weapons and armour are now grouped by melee, ranged and magic, so each list is one ladder climbing
Materials are now in tier order instead of alphabetical, lowest tier first
Everything you can make and Everything you can gather are now linked at the top of the page

Crafting stations

A box at the top of the workbench narrows the list to what you type
A checkbox hides recipes your trade cannot reach yet, and remembers the choice

Everywhere

The navigation is in the same order and uses the same words on every screen
News is permanently in the navigation, as well as burning in the status bar when there is something new

The castle south of Cindergate

August 28, 2026 · 08:00

Cindergate was always a gate to somewhere. A gate with no wall left either side of it, and something still bothering to keep it shut. South-east of it, across the fields it used to feed, there is a fortress — and the fortress is still standing.

Seven places, from the ploughland outside to the keep at the middle: Gallowfield, Rotwater, Hallowgate, The Ashen Bailey, Cinderward and Grimhold, with The Grinning Teeth off to one side where the portcullis came down and stayed down.

They ask for level 65 at the field's edge and 82 at the keep door, and what lives in them runs from 66 to 85. Every one holds a melee, a ranged and a magic fighter, so no route through is the easy one.

The archer in the gatehouse

Something roosts above the fallen portcullis and shoots at what comes near. The Iron Fletcher is the fourth boss in the game and the first that fights at range — the three before it were melee, melee and magic, which had quietly made one answer good against all of them.

It drops a ring, and it drops it about once in a thousand kills.

Two more rungs, and the ladder is finished

Gear at 72 and 82, every slot in every trade, same as it has always been done. These are the last two: recipes climb ten crafting levels a rung, so the one above would want a crafting level that does not exist.

That is deliberate rather than a wall. What comes after is meant to be found rather than made.

Something to gather in a place with no fields

A castle has no seam and no forest. It has everything somebody carried in and left instead — so you work the fields and the reeds outside the walls, and the broken gate, the burnt siege engines, the hangings and the forge once you are inside them.

Alchemy gets a rung too. Siegebloom tonic heals 435, and it grows in the physic garden, which is the one thing a castle certainly had and nobody has weeded since.

The door at the bottom of the keep

Grimhold is unbreached, and the door at the foot of the stair is shut from the other side. It stays shut for now.

New

Seven places south-east of Cindergate: fields, a moat, a gatehouse, two baileys and a keep
Twenty-one monsters, levels 66 to 85
The Grinning Teeth, hanging off the gatehouse, and the ranged boss in it
Two rungs of gear for every trade, worn at 72 and 82
Siegebloom tonic, and the physic garden it grows in
A ring off the boss, the rarest thing in the game

Balance

The balance report has a line for alchemy, which it never had

Running away, and going for good

August 27, 2026 · 09:22

Leaving a fight now clears the queue. A fight is decided the moment it starts, and the log reveals it while the clock runs — so leaving one and letting the rest of the queue carry on meant reading the outcome and stepping out of every fight you were going to lose. Death is the only real consequence the game has, and that made it optional.

Dying has always cancelled everything still queued; that is what makes a long queue a bet worth making. Running away costs the same thing. You keep your life, your loot and your unspent potions, and you lose the queue.

And it leaves you shaken — the same weakness dying applies, for two minutes instead of eight. Fleeing again restarts that clock rather than deepening it. Stopping a gather or a craft leaves no mark; it costs you the work and nothing else.

There is one button for this now instead of two. It says Flee in a fight and Stop anywhere else, and both take the queue with them. Removing something from the queue that has not started is unchanged and still costs nothing.

Separately: dying twice in quick succession no longer stacks the penalty. It restarts it. You wake with 1 hp and no queue, so a second death was an easy thing to walk into, and two debuffs at once made it much harder to walk back out.

Your account has a page

At /account: the characters on it, who you have muted, and the way out. It replaces the old character-select screen, which had been the account page in all but name and had no way back into the game from it.

A character can be retired on its own, which frees the slot and releases the name. Retiring the one you are playing hands you the other. It is refused while that character has something running.

An account can be deleted. Your characters, their levels, everything they carry and everything in the bank go, and your name and email address are both released.

What other people can see stays, with your name off it. Things you sold keep their prices, what you said in a room stays in that room, and letters you sent stay in the inboxes they reached — all of it as a departed player. None of it is only yours to remove: a price is what the market did, and half a conversation is somebody else's half.

Both take a confirmation, and deleting an account takes your password as well.

Banning takes down what was said

An account that is banned now has everything it ever wrote hidden — every room, every inbox, at once. Lifting a ban brings it all back.

Finding one thing

The bank and the auction house have a box at the top. Type `silv` and you are left with the silverleaf and the silverleaf draughts; empty it and everything comes back. It survives a task finishing, so you can filter your bank with a craft queue running and it will still be filtering when the queue lands.

And a smaller one

An account that signs up and never follows the confirmation link is now deleted after 7 days, and its address goes back into circulation — so an address is no longer held for ever by somebody who never arrived. The link in the letter says so, and so does the page you wait on.

And the Rusted dagger is now the Goblin sling. It has always been a ranged weapon — it falls off the goblin, which fights ranged — but nothing about the name said so, and what a weapon counts as decides which side of the triangle you attack from. Same item, same numbers, in the same place in your bag.

Combat

Leaving a fight clears the rest of the queue, exactly as dying does
Leaving a fight leaves you shaken: -20% to every stat for 2 minutes
One button where there were two — it reads Flee in a fight, Stop elsewhere, and both clear
A second death no longer deepens the first debuff; it restarts its clock

Your account

A page of your own at /account: your characters, who you have muted, and the way out
A character can be retired on its own, which frees the slot and the name
An account can be deleted, which releases the name and the email address

Moderation

Banning an account hides everything it ever said, in every room and every inbox

Elsewhere

A box at the top of the bank and the auction house narrows the list to what you type
An account that is never confirmed is deleted after 7 days, and its address freed
The Rusted dagger is now the Goblin sling — it was always a ranged weapon, whatever it was called

Reference

How combat works has a section on fleeing

The bottles in the bar

August 26, 2026 · 12:09

The status bar counts your potions. A flask and a number, beside the rest of what it tells you, on every page in the world rather than only in the bag.

It falls as they are drunk. A fight decides when to drink the moment it starts, but the log reveals those rounds as the clock runs — so the count now follows the log rather than the decision, and the bottles leave your bag one at a time as each drink is read out. Flee, and anything the log never got to is still yours, which matches what fleeing has always cost: the rounds you were shown, and nothing after them.

Other rooms keep up now. Standing at the bank while a craft finishes shows the new item on the shelf; the vendor and the auction house do the same. They used to wait for you to reload the page.

Interface

The status bar shows how many potions you are carrying, wherever you are standing
The count falls as potions are drunk mid-fight, and the bag empties with it
Fleeing gives back any bottle the log never poured
The bank, the vendor and the auction house update when a task finishes

West of Lastlight

August 24, 2026 · 10:20

There is content above level 50. Five places west of Lastlight, asking for 50 to 64 and running to level 67 at the bottom of the barrows. They are corrupted ground, so Lastlight now has the blight on three sides of it.

Gear goes two rungs further, worn at 52 and 62, with everything behind it — ore, hides, cobweb thread, wood, herbs and the nodes to gather them from. Every trade gets the same rungs, worth the same, as always.

The boss is a magic fighter. Both bosses before this one were melee, which had quietly made magic the answer to every boss in the game. It drops the second necklace there has ever been — the first was Hollowtusk's tooth, forty-seven levels below it.

Elsewhere: a button at the foot of your bag breaks down everything you have the enchanting level for, in one click.

New

Five places west of Lastlight: a haunted wood, a gallows road, and the barrows with two floors under them
Two more rungs of gear for every trade, worn at 52 and 62, with the materials, nodes and recipes behind them
Two more healing potions
A boss at the bottom of the barrows, and the second necklace in the game

Interface

A button at the foot of the bag breaks down everything you have the enchanting level for, in one click

How a fight is decided

August 22, 2026 · 08:15

There is a page for how combat works. It has the accuracy and damage formulas written out, what each of the four numbers on an item actually does, and the weapon triangle with the percentage it is worth.

Two things on it are worth knowing whether or not you read the rest. Your character drinks on their own whenever health falls below half, strongest potion first, during a fight and not only on the way into one. And loot you have no room for is lost — coins always arrive, items need a free slot.

Every number on the page is read from the same setting the game fights with, so it cannot fall out of step.

New

A reference page for combat: both rolls, the damage formula, the weapon triangle, how long a fight takes, when a potion is drunk, what a win pays and what dying costs

Interface

The reference, leaderboards and map pages set their text at the width the news uses, instead of a narrower one beside full-width lists