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Update Notes: June 22 & June 23, 2026

Project: Gorgon · Community Announcements · June 24, 2026

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This is a big one, with new content, new game systems, and new rendering changes. As always, we don't go into too much detail about new content because we want to let you discover it. But we'll point you in the right directions:


New Dungeon: Statehelm Crypt


The Statehelm Crypt has been redone with new artwork, and the previously perma-locked door to the group-dungeon area can now be opened! (You have to pull a lever at the end of the solo part of the Crypt to open the group door. But the solo part's pretty short.) This is a new level 100 experience for a group of 6 players. It's intended to be "tough but fair". We'll see how you feel about it and make changes if necessary.

Important:

because this dungeon was completely redesigned, when you log in you may be stuck in a wall or other geometry. Don't panic; first try the command `/stuck` in chat to fix yourself. If that doesn't work, send a "Stuck" bug report. This will teleport you back to the newbie island so you can continue playing.


Revised Dungeon: Statehelm Sewer


The Statehelm Sewer dungeon isn't new, but it has had a lot of issues fixed. This is a solo-oriented level 100 dungeon, a bit on the hard side, but not impossible to solo. There are also several group bosses in this dungeon now. They are on the weaker side (as far as bosses go) and are intended for a group of 3 or 4-ish players. The hope is that players can create pick-up groups in the sewer to tackle these challenges.

Important:

as part of completing the Statehelm Sewer, the dungeon had to be "moved" internally. If you logged out in the sewer, you will login to empty space and fall to your death. Don't worry, your death will be painless and if you are in hardcore mode, you will not be penalized. However, when you respawn, you will find yourself in the Statehelm Crypt instead. Do not panic; simply leave the crypt and return to the sewers to continue your sewer adventures.


New Statehelm City Content


There is more to do and more to kill in Statehelm at night. There are dozens of new favor-quests as well!


The Secret of Luminence


Aralorn in Gazluk now offers a new questline.


Shieldwright Skill


you can learn the new Shieldwright skill from a new NPC named Nolan Coldsteel in Statehelm. It requires level 50 in Blacksmithing, Carpentry, and Sigil Scripting. The skill begins at level 50. The standard shield-crafting recipes focus on making Shield skill users better tanks. But there are also a bunch of other shield recipes intended for different purposes.

(There's actually a second new skill in this update, Magical Roasting, but it's pretty niche so we'll just let you discover it and the associated content.)


New Weekly Event Buffs


Visit Barbran in Serbule to take on a new random quest each week. Completing this quest will give you either one Live-Event Credit or a random buff that lasts 6 days.


New Game System: Mastery Sparks


Mastery Sparks are a new way to improve your gear. You can find Mastery Sparks in many ways. The most obvious one is via random loot. Different Mastery Sparks fit into different types of items (e.g. some sparks only go into Organic Armor, or Cloth Hats, or Wooden Clubs, etc.) These are relatively rare-drop items that can be found on most monsters above level 50. Different types of creatures tend to drop the same kind of Spark. (For example, deer tend to drop Mastery Sparks that go into wands, whereas tigers tend to drop sparks for blades.) All boss monsters over level 50 can drop more generic sparks, too.

Spark Buffs


Once you find a Mastery Spark, you can take it to the armor shop in Statehelm. There's a workbench in the back where you can imbue your equipment with the Mastery Spark. Then you can use that same workbench to "spend" your Mastery Spark on a small permanent item buff.

Spending a Spark costs you 100 Combat Wisdom. You'll choose a category, such as Knife Damage, and then randomly receive a buff such as "+1 Knife Damage", "+1% Slashing Damage", "+3% Knife Base Damage", etc. These are modest buffs but they stack up pretty quickly when you have a bunch of Sparks.

Different items have different choices available, but in general, Main-Hand weapons, Off-Hand weapons, Rings and Necklaces have offensive bonuses, whereas armor-slot equipment is more defensive. But there are exceptions. Right now the options are somewhat limited; we expect to add more esoteric build-specific buffs over time.

In addition to loot Sparks, you can also find Mastery Sparks as rewards at the end of dungeons. (Well, currently just one dungeon.) These sparks behave the same, but they're capped differently: an item can have up to 40 loot-drop Mastery Sparks plus up to 10 dungeon-boss Mastery Sparks.

And if the item is Mastercrafted or Foretold of in Prophecy, you can use special recipes to add up to 60 more Mastery Sparks!

Mastercrafting/Foretold Sparks


In late beta we added a system called "Mastercrafting Recipes" which let you add damage to Prophecied or Mastercrafted weapons. That implementation ended up being way too powerful, so those recipes were disabled until we could revise things. Which happens today! Those recipes have been repurposed to add Mastery Sparks to items instead.

Here's the gist: if you have a Prophecied or Mastercrafted weapon or piece of armor, you'll want to find the recipe "Energize Mastercrafted or Prophecied X", where X is the type of thing it is (e.g. Hammer, Leather Armor, etc.). These recipes can be found as extremely-high-level loot scrolls.

Next, to use the recipes, you'll need an exotic crafting component (such as Weapons-Grade Sandpaper and Jeweler's Maintenance Kits). To craft those, you'll need to find their toolcrafting recipes, or buy them from other players. (Tip: there are two reward bundles in the Elven Judgment experience that helps with this part: one gives all the Toolcrafting recipes for weapon sparks and the other for armor sparks.)

You can use these recipes on a Mastercrafted/Foretold item up to 60 times each. (Each use costs 1 crafting point, and Mastercrafted/Prophecied weapons have 160 crafting points, which is exactly enough for an Augment and 60 uses of this recipe.) These Sparks are tracked separately from Sparks obtained by loot items or dungeon rewards.

As you can tell by all the different recipes needed, Mastercrafting is a high-level thing. But the loot-droppable Sparks can be used at much lower level. "Won't that be wasting your spark if you put it on low-level gear?" you ask. No, because you can transfer sparks!

Spark Transfer


When it's time to replace your item, you can siphon out the Sparks and put them into a different item. You do this from the same workstation used to spend sparks. There are a bunch of caveats (which you can read in-game), but to summarize:

Other things to know


Goodbye to the Old System


On Arisetsu server (the server that existed during beta), there are approximately 400 players with items that have the old Mastercrafting buffs on them. These items have been converted to the new system as best as possible. For each point of Universal Direct Damage on the item, it now has 1 Mastery Spark. But the item can't have more than 60 Mastery Sparks, so if you had more bonus damage than that, it's lost.

Although we said at the time that we'd need to nerf these recipes, we know it's never fun to be nerfed. We're sorry. A silver lining: those items aren't even max-level anymore! You can use the Spark Transfer feature to move those Sparks to a new weapon.

One weird caveat: the old recipes didn't always cost a crafting point -- it was a random chance. When your items were converted, we didn't bother trying to figure out how much crafting points your item should have; it's just been left alone. This means you may have 60 Mastery Sparks and still have leftover crafting points. That's fine; you can spend those points on other buffs as you see fit. (The Spark recipes have an internal limit of 60, so you can't go over that cap even if you have extra crafting points.)


Engine Changes


You may have noticed this update is huge! That's because you had to re-download everything. We changed how assets are streamed. This change should mean that scenes load noticeably faster if you have an old-school hard drive, or even a classic PCIe SSD. (It doesn't improve M.2 SSD very much, though.)

In addition, this change lets us stream assets faster during gameplay, which should result in fewer FPS hiccups.

There are many new settings related to loading-screen performance available in the Settings menu, for people who want to really fiddle with settings to get optimum performance.


Roulette


There is a new roulette game in the Red Wing Casino. This is one of those "your game devs were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" type things. It turns out that yes, it was relatively easy to implement roulette in the Gorgon Game Engine. So... here you go.


Everything Else


There's so much more to cover! Some of these things are pretty major. Some are just bug fixes.


Update Notes: June 23, 2026


A quick update to fix some issues with yesterday's update:
We continue to work on issues related to translucent vegetation, weird cloud issues, and problems with missing shadows. We'll be back with more fixes soon!
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