Hello everyone!
Before anything else, I want to say thank you. More than 80% of Portalborn's players are Chinese, and your support, your reports, and your patience with a game built by one person have meant more to me than I can easily put into words.
I've always intended for Portalborn to have seasonal portals, and Halloween will be the next one. While looking ahead at holidays and events I could build content around, I realised that the Mid-Autumn Festival was coming up at just the right time for me to create something for it. With so many of you celebrating it, I almost had to go for it.
Mid-Autumn isn't a holiday I celebrated growing up in the US, and as I read about it, one part of it stayed with me. So many of us now live far from the people we care about — our lives scatter us across cities and countries, and we keep in touch through screens and phones. The idea of looking up at the same moon as someone far away, knowing they might be looking at it too, felt more fitting now than ever, and it really resonated with me.
So I knew that if I was going to make a Mid-Autumn portal, I needed to put real effort into understanding what I was building around. I spent a lot of time researching its customs, stories, foods, poetry, and the different traditions that have grown up around it in different places, and tried to turn those things into a place that feels lived in rather than simply decorated for a holiday.
I can only hope that I've done that research well, and that the result feels familiar to those of you who know these traditions far better than I do. More importantly, I hope it's somewhere you enjoy exploring. I can certainly say that I've enjoyed making it!
To everyone celebrating, 中秋快乐! I hope you get to share the moon with the people you love, however far apart you may be.
For anyone unfamiliar with it: the Mid-Autumn Festival falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when the moon is traditionally held to be at its fullest and brightest. It's a celebration of the harvest and of family reunion — lanterns, mooncakes, and gathering to look at the moon together, even with loved ones who are far away. The portal will tell you the rest.
The Mid-Autumn Festival
A new portal, the Mid-Autumn Festival, has now been added to the list of available portals, open to players of every level. It will stay open until around October 5, so everyone has time to visit.
Inside is a lantern-lit festival night across eleven rooms: a moon-gate square, a lane of paper lanterns, a sugar painter's stall, a moon-watching pavilion, an osmanthus grove, a quiet courtyard, a moon altar and a reunion hall — and some places open up as the night goes on. There are festival-goers to meet, from a mooncake seller and a riddle-keeper to families, children and a grandmother at the altar, and even some of the crowd will answer if you talk to them. Dozens of things are waiting to be examined, each carrying a piece of Mid-Autumn tradition, along with a few keepsakes to find.
There's also a short festival story, played once, with rewards that scale to your level:
Guanghan cakes, which permanently increase the experience you gain by 5%
Osmanthus wine, which grants one permanent unspent attribute point, kept through ascension
Mooncakes from the mooncake seller, which restore half your health for 500 gold each — stock up while the festival lasts
And for those who see the festival through, a new companion is waiting: the Jade Rabbit, which reduces the damage you take from enemy attacks by 1%.
Once the story is done, the festival changes, and stays that way.
A heads-up: this isn't a heavy combat portal. This one is all about telling a story and highlighting some of the wonders of the festival, so I really recommend taking your time and reading the details. If that isn't your thing, don't worry — you can also move through the quests quickly and still pick up some nifty rewards.
And for those of you who grew up celebrating this holiday: if any of the references, traditions, or scenes in the portal simply don't work, please let me know. I'll listen — and at the very least, I'll make sure next year's festival is even better for it.
