Patch Notes

A fourth class, and it doesn’t come alone.

• The Hunter. Hide and fur, a fast crossbow and a beast at your side. You pin the swarm at range with slows, traps and Blind while your pet does the close work. Your basic shot fires on its own and costs nothing on the move, so kiting is the whole game.
• Your pet is half the class. Every Hunter starts with a Dire Wolf Pup. Pets level from your kills, learn three skills as they grow, and pick new tricks along the way. A dead pet comes back after 60 s, and that minute is the Hunter’s real danger.
• Four kinds of pet. The skills come from the pet’s role, not the animal:
  • DPS (Dire Wolf): Lunge, Rend and Maul.
  • Tank (Brook Boar): Bull Rush, Brace and Hold Ground.
  • Healer (Meadow Hart): Soothing Glow, Mending Aura and Rescue.
  • Support (Duskwing): Rallying Howl, Quickening Call and Keen Senses.
• Named pets. Old Gnasher (Bone Crunch) and Greymane the Packmother (Call the Pack, with ghost wolves) bring their own unique skill. They’re the only pets that go all the way to level 60, through upgrades at the stables.
• Getting pets. Beasts a Hunter kills sometimes drop their pet: rarely for ordinary beasts, often for named ones. Mastering a beast’s Monster Book page unlocks its pet for every Hunter on your account.
• The Stable Master. Moll Fetterly and her family now live at the Brookmeadow stables. She swaps your active pet, resets its picks, upgrades named pets, sells pet food and mixes beast treats.
• Loyalty. A new bar under your Health. Kills by you or your pet fill it, and every quarter gives you both a buff. Go 6 s without a kill and it drops a tier; lose your pet and it empties.
• Q: the trap belt. Each press drops the next trap: Snare, Caltrops, Tar Pot, then Blast Trap, which throws enemies back toward your pet.
• Space: Tumble Shot. A dodge-roll that sprays rings of bolts all round you.
• F sends your pet, E feeds it, G opens the Pet panel. Food in the food slot is thrown at your pet on its own when it’s hurt. Scraps never run out; better food heals more or adds a buff.
• Eight crossbow skills for three slots: Scatter Bolt, Crippling Bolt, Hunter’s Mark, Piercing Shot, Ricochet Bolt, Kickback Shot, Hail of Bolts and Flare Shot. Each has forks to choose as it ranks up. Hail of Bolts picks a pack at range, stays where it lands, and rains bolts you can see.
• Ten passives, pick four, and three talent trees: Beastmaster (the pet), Marksman (the crossbow) and Trapper (traps and debuffs).
• Your pet has a life. In town it idles, gets petted by villagers, and sometimes poops; step in it and you’re Stinky. Pet it, feed it, play fetch, rename it. Don’t kick it three times.
• Hunter’s Hide. A new armour type only Hunters wear, with 13 looks from level 1 to 60, each with its own crossbow. There are three new sets (Packbond, Deadeye, Snarewright) and five Brookmeadow chase uniques: Gnasher’s Jaw, Millstone Arbalest, Bristleback Hood, Herdsman’s Gloves and Tarpit Belt.
• Two new beasts in Brookmeadow. The Brook Boar paws the ground and charges. The Meadow Hart bells to speed up the beasts around it. Both have Monster Book pages and new crafting materials.
• Enemies have a trick or two. A few enemies in each pack now have a move worth watching. Elites always do.
  • Some Dire Wolves pounce: a crouch, a red circle where they’ll land, then a leap.
  • Some Bog Goblins lob mud pots that leave a slowing puddle, and some Hex Witches throw Hexfire that leaves a burning one.
  • Some Ghouls and Cave Skitters burst into poison when they die.
• A title theme. The title screen has its own music now. It plays through character creation and hands over to the zone music when you arrive.

The game has a name: Varfess. This update also brings a new way in, a proper Skills menu, a Diablo-style bag, a Space move for every class, and a look of its own for every Priest and Rogue skill.

A new way in

• Title cinematic. Clouds gather over Brookmeadow, the camera dives through them and tours the village and a battle in the Sunny Fields: one hero of each class in end-game gear against a horde and a Mire Troll. A click or a key skips it.
• Login and character list in the 3D panel style. Any name and password works (there are no accounts yet). The name is remembered only if you tick the box; the password never is.
• Delete a character with the X on its card. You type its name to confirm, and the card crumbles away.
• Character creation puts the class last, on a screen of its own. Each class shows its meters, its starting weapon and its first six skills. Hover a skill to watch it: your hero plays it on the stage against practice foes. The rest of the kit is listed as "more to earn", and the "?" slots are classes still to come.
• Entering the world is an arrival, not a cut. A beam marks the spot, you drop out of the sky and slam down with a shock wave, and the HUD flies in.

New: the Skills menu (K)

The Arsenal is now the Skills menu, rebuilt in the 3D PS1 style.

• Left: your six skill slots in bar order (keys 1–6) and four passive slots.
• Middle: every skill or passive your class has, as cards with their grade and rank, or the level they come at.
• Right: a live preview. Your own hero, in your gear, plays the skill you hover (or the one you picked) against practice foes. Under it are the details: rank, twists, forks and prestige.
• Equip: pick a slot, then click a skill twice, or drag it onto a slot. Drag a skill off its slot (or right-click the slot) to empty it. Equipping throws the icon into the slot, which slams and sparks.

New: Q and Space on the bar, and a Space move for everyone

• Q and Space tiles sit over the skill bar for every class, with icons, a cooldown, a glow when ready and a hover card. The Priest's Q shows your Density; the Rogue's shows the tool you're holding (every stolen tool has its own icon now).
• Warrior: Leap (Space). Jump up to 6 m the way you face. The landing hits everything within 3 m for 80% Attack and shoves it back 2.5 m. 8 s cooldown. PROVISIONAL
• Rogue: Shadow Step (Space). Dash 7 m the way you face, straight through enemies. Each one you pass is cut for 50% Attack and bleeds. It doesn't hide you. 6 s cooldown. PROVISIONAL
• The Priest keeps Step of Light. Walls stop every dash, and in a safe area dashes move you but hit nothing.

New: a look for every Priest and Rogue skill

Every skill now has its own colour, shape and motion, so a busy screen still reads at a glance.

• Sauce on all of them: a wind-up, a flash that pops past its size, rings that bounce, a follow-through of its own and twinkles left hanging. Higher-level skills are grander: from level 18 the screen flashes, and from level 23 the moment freezes for a split second. Small, frequent hits (a hop, a stab, a bite) get a lighter pop with no shake.
• Lasting effects move: pools and clouds breathe and ripple, halos and motes pulse, the dome shimmers, and thrown knives spin.
• Q and Space got the same treatment for every class: Giant Swing, Expel, Step of Light, stolen tools, Leap and Shadow Step.
• Every one of the 28 has a showcase of its own in the Skills menu preview.

Gear and the bag

• A Diablo-style bag: a 12 × 8 grid where items take room by their size. Drag to reorganise; drop on another item to swap, or carry it on the cursor until there's room.

• The bag fills the panel's width. Anything that doesn't fit goes to storage (with a note), so you never hold loot you can't place.
• Hovering a piece of gear spins it. Item borders are slimmer.
• The materials tab shows every material as its own little 3D model.

Interface

• The Menu button (bottom right, or O) opens a panel with every window and its key. Windows still to come are "?" cards. It never shows on the title or login screens.
• Hover cards on the bar: skills, passives and your weapon show a card in the gear panel's style.
• Talent board: every Rogue talent has its own icon, and the Rogue trees have their own creeds and lines.
• The controls line under the HUD is gone (the Menu has them all).

Faster

• Hovering the bag no longer stutters: the first hover went from about 190 ms to under 2 ms, and an open bag costs less than half as much per frame. Item spins are built a frame at a time.

Controls

• K opens Skills (was the Arsenal). Space is your class's dash. O opens the Menu.

Now that there are two classes, we sat down and checked how they hold up next to each other.

• Group fights feel like group fights. Every extra player makes each wave noticeably thicker, but the battle has fewer waves overall. Before, a big group got long, thin fights where everyone stood around. Now it's crowded and over sooner.
• Turn up late, bring friends. Joining a battle mid-wave adds reinforcements right away, so the enemies arrive with you. Joining late in the fight only adds one more wave, so you don't drag it out.
• Outposts and Camps. Every camp is now either a short Outpost (5–10 waves) or a full Camp (10–20). The skull plate tells you which before you commit.
• Monsters have taste. Enemies no longer all sprint at whoever pulled. They spread out, and some of them have favourites: Dire Wolves smell anyone below half Health, Bog Trappers and Gloom Seers hunt healers, Barrow Knights want a fight with someone in plate. It's a pull, not a lock. Hit them hard enough and they'll change their mind.
• The Priest got squishier, on purpose. Less Health and Defence. Stand in a full wave and you'll last about five seconds. Keep moving.
• Solo Priests aren't left with dead buttons. With no ally nearby, the Priest's support spells do something useful instead: Mend heals you a little or smites the crowd, Aegis bursts outwards, Lifeline latches onto the toughest enemy and burns it.

The second class is here, and it's the first one that fights with light instead of a very large sword.

• The Priest. Cloth, faith and a lot of glowing. Spells fire on their own like the Warrior's skills, so your job is positioning. Two buttons are yours: Expel (Q) and Step of Light (Space), a short teleport away from trouble that leaves a burst where you stood.
• Wand or staff. The wand fires quick bolts that bounce between enemies. The staff fires a slower beam that punches through a whole line.
• Heals that think for you. Mend finds whoever is lowest, Aegis finds whoever is getting hit hardest, Purify fires the moment someone near you picks up a debuff.
• Density. A violet bar that fills as you kill. At low levels it just makes your heals better. Push it past 75 and every cast becomes a gamble: it might Surge and hit far harder, or Backfire and sputter. Dump the lot with Expel for a holy nova that hurts enemies and heals friends.
• Skill Twists. The old "+10% damage" style upgrade cards are gone for both classes. Twists change what a skill does, not just how big the number is.
• Debuffs for everyone. Poison, bleeds, burning, slows, freezing, electrified, stone and gravity can now land on anything, you included.
• Three Priest talent trees: Zealot, Warden and Grace, some with choices you have to commit to.

No new zone this time. We just made everything feel better to hit, loot and look at.

• Every Warrior skill has its own look. Whirlwind spins a real blade, War Cry rolls out a shockwave, Last Stand puts a halo over your head. You can tell what just happened without reading anything.
• Loot actually drops. Items and coins burst out of whatever died, bounce and land. Rare stuff gets a light beam, and the beam gets more dramatic the rarer it is. Uniques strike down from the sky. You'll know.
• The Monster Book (B). A leather bestiary that floats up, flips open and riffles to the page you want. Each monster is sketched in pencil, then pops into 3D next to its notes. It keeps count of how many of each you've killed. Fill it in.
• New Talent board (T). Three war banners. Spend a point and molten metal runs down the channels, snaps the padlocks off the next tier and sends embers flying to the talent. A tiny Warrior beside it reacts to your choices, and has opinions.
• The People tree (P). Brookmeadow's villagers now hang off a big oak grouped by family, with threads of light between people who know each other. Hover someone for gossip.
• Runs smoother, and there's an FPS counter by the minimap if you like watching numbers.

Brookmeadow was handing out everything, including end-game gear. Not anymore.

• Gear has a level requirement. You can't wear what you're not ready for. Items you can't use yet are dimmed in your bag.
• Brookmeadow drops Brookmeadow gear (levels 1–15) and only things your class can wear.
• Way less loot spam. About 5–6 items per full camp instead of 15, so when something drops it means something.
• Chase items with a home. Boots of the Bull from named monsters, Skyhook Vambraces from the Brood Queen, Stormbreak Pauldrons from the Mire Troll. Go get them.
• New levelling curve. Levels 1–10 fly by. After that the climb is built for a zone shared with lots of other players.
• Group XP. Several players hitting the same monster share its XP, with a bonus for teaming up. Bosses and named monsters pay everyone in full, always.
• Armoured enemies are less spongy and worth more XP, so the quarry and ridge are worth your time.

We rebuilt the Warrior around one idea: make space, hold the crowd, keep moving.

• Launch. Some hits throw enemies into the air. When they land, they flatten whoever's underneath. Hitting something mid-air sends it twice as far. Juggling is encouraged.
• Grit. A new bar that protects you from being stunned, rooted or knocked around. It doesn't stop damage, it stops you losing control.
• Rebuilt talents. Three trees, Warmonger, Butcher and Ironwarden, full of rules that link your skills together instead of flat stat bumps. Your old talent points were refunded.
• Gear sets and uniques. Six-piece sets whose bonuses change your skills, and eight uniques that completely transform one.
• The Bounty Board. It's in the village square. Kill bounties, area bounties, named hunts and boss contracts that refill over time.
• Six zone events. Timber Run, Mill Clog, Harvest Before Dark, Cave-in at Glimmerdeep, Lantern Night and Restless Fields. They branch depending on whether you win or fail, so the zone's story moves. Escort, defend, gather, and drag things around on a rope, including logs, barrels and at least one villager who will not stop complaining about it.
• Quest tracker on screen and a Quests panel on J.

Brookmeadow went from a handful of villagers to a proper little town with drama.

• 43 villagers, all with full names, families, friends, rivals, crushes and debts.
• They have lives. Work in the morning, lunch at the inn, gossip at the well in the evening, home through their own front door at night. After dark the night watch walks the lanes, a couple of drunks wander the square and a thief creeps through the alleys.
• Shops close at night. Ring the bell and the owner, or whoever got stuck covering, pops out to serve you.
• The People ledger (P). Greet villagers to add them. Find out who's related to whom. Meet a whole family to earn their perk (the Ironhands give you Attack, the Applegates give you Health). Big milestones unlock titles and Tilly's Daisy Crown.
• They talk about you. Die in a silly way and they'll mention it. Kill a boss and they'll mention that too. Ask around for rumours and you'll get real hints about caches and named monsters.
• Other "heroes". Until real players arrive, a cast of stand-in adventurers levels up, kills bosses and dies to embarrassing things. The villagers compare you to them. Occasionally someone in town realises they're in a game.

The biggest update so far.

• Glimmerdeep Mine. The first dungeon, and there's no loading screen. Walk down the tunnel and you're in it. Spiders, cave bats, walking mushrooms, crystal golems and a caster who hides behind the swarm.
• The Heartstone and Vexa, the Brood Queen. Crack the crystal, survive four waves, and a giant spider comes down on her thread. She stabs, screeches, pounces and calls her babies. When she dies, they all go with her.
• Day, night and weather. A real sky with a sun, moon and stars. Rain, thunderstorms and morning fog. Wind moves every bit of grass. Lanterns and windows light up at night, and fireflies come out.
• 3D GPS and world map (M). The minimap is a tiny living diorama of the zone. Open it up and you can fly over the whole valley.
• Waypoint pins. Middle-click anywhere and a pillar of light slams down from the sky.
• Level-ups that feel like level-ups. Giant pixel LEVEL UP! letters, and picks wait in a tab (L) so they never interrupt a fight. The card you pick flies out and slams into your chest.
• A new gear panel (I) with your Warrior standing in the middle wearing what you've got on.
• A new way to die. Time slows, the colour drains out, you're torn into pixels and fall through a tunnel between worlds before landing back in the village. Dying has never looked this good.
• Villagers have voices. Undertale-style blips, a different one for everyone.

• Camp battles. Every camp is now a wave fight with named monsters and a warning before you commit. Brookmeadow has 90 camps, plus roaming groups that wander between them.
• Skull ratings. Floating plates over each camp show 1–5 chomping skulls. The scarier ones shake.
• Satisfying deaths. Enemies go flying when they die, spin, bounce off trees and walls. Crits can chop them clean in half. The Mire Troll gets a proper dramatic faceplant.
• The impact layer. Kills do something to the battlefield too. Bodies get thrown into other enemies, bleeds jump to the next target, heavy hits leave dust clouds that slow.
• Sprint. Hold Shift. Watch your stamina.
• Monsters climb out of portals instead of just appearing.
• Armour you can see. 13 Warrior armour sets from level 1 to 60, and a matching greatsword for each. Your Warrior now grips it with both hands like they mean it.
• A brand new HUD. Health is a sloshing glass vial, stamina is a brass tube, XP is a crystal, and your level sits on a gold medallion that flips when you level up. The action bar is 3D too.
• Chaos. Kill enough and the zone tips into an hour of Chaos: everything goes level 60, bosses show up and something called Vharok, the Unmade arrives near the end. Currently locked out of Brookmeadow, for everyone's safety.
• Villagers you can talk to. Press E and have a chat.
• Music. Brookmeadow has a soundtrack now.

Day one. A survivors-style action game with MMO bones, wearing a PS1 look.

• The Warrior. Thirty skills, a pile of modifiers and talents to mess with.
• Brookmeadow. An 800 m open zone with a safe village, a river, a lake and plenty of things to kill.
• Character creator. Pick your body, face, hair, beard and clothes on a little spinning turntable, then choose a class. (There's one class. Choose wisely.)
• Encounters, hidden caches, tasks, reputation and loot to find while you're out there.