Changelog

The real update history of Wanderer — what shipped, when, and why. Longer write-ups of the bigger items appear on the blog.

September 2026

1 September — One monster, one monster on screen

A fight you lost drew the monster twice. The battle animation takes over the creature's sprite for the length of the fight, which hands it off from the layer that draws the world. That layer then made a fresh one on the very next tick — so for as long as the fight ran, two identical creatures stood side by side, one swinging at you and one going about its business. On a win it was invisible (the creature is gone the moment the fight resolves), but every fight you LOST showed the double — and against a boss that meant two bosses, at four times the size of an ordinary monster. The world layer now leaves a creature alone while the fight owns it, exactly as it has always done for other players' sprites.

August 2026

29 August — A tempered upgrade no longer looks like nothing happened

Auto-equip announcements now name the quality. Every piece in a gear set shares one name, so putting on a Relic Steel Chestplate over an Epic one announced itself as "Equipped Steel Chestplate (replacing Steel Chestplate)". It now reads Equipped Relic Steel Chestplate (replacing Epic Steel Chestplate), and the same goes for a displaced piece that auto-sell disposes of.
The tempering bench says when it put the new piece straight on. With auto-equip switched on, a successful temper could produce an upgrade good enough to wear at once — which meant the new piece was never in the pack, and the piece it displaced (the old quality) was. Three Epic chestplates went in and an Epic chestplate was all you could see afterwards. The result message now ends with It went straight on — auto-equip.
The forge bar no longer gives the answer away. The bench fills a three-second bar before revealing an outcome, but the server's reply arrived immediately, so the result — and any auto-equip announcement riding with it — appeared while the bar was still filling. Those messages are now held back and shown with the reveal.

28 August — The Hundred-Day Road

A reward for every day you come back, for a hundred days. Open the game after a day away and the catch-up screen now leads with a reel of three cards: what you got yesterday, what you get today, and what tomorrow holds. Two counters sit above it and are always on screen — days on the road (your real number, whether that is 3 or 300) and rewards claimed. Everyone starts the new ladder at reward 1, however long they have been playing, and nothing about your history is pretended away.
It counts the days you showed up, not the days in a row. Miss a Tuesday and you lose nothing: the ladder only ever moves forward. You can claim one reward a day, and you can never be sent back to the beginning.
The first week is the generous one. Day 3 hands over 20,000 gold — for most new wanderers, more than they have ever held at once, and enough to open the whole shop. Day 5 is a Fishing Rod and a Cauldron, day 7 a Bronze Woodcutter's Axe, day 10 the Mini Map. Four professions and the map, inside a fortnight, without grinding for any of them.
Fourteen days out of the hundred are sealed, and you break them open yourself. A box you tap opens itself; a box you have to break is a present. Drag the wax across and it cracks — let go early and it settles back. There are three sizes as the road goes on, none of them can disappoint (the worst roll always beats that day's plain coins), and a sealed box you haven't opened is still waiting for you at your next login.
Four new things to keep in your pack. The Roadfire Flask is an hour of doubled XP and gold that waits in your pack until you choose the hour. The Repair Chit mends one worn piece back to full, free, wherever you are standing — there is a "Chit" button beside the Repair button on any damaged piece. Waystone Dust carries you to the nearest town you have never stood in, which makes it the only thing in the world that moves you forward instead of back. The Courier's Whistle sells your whole pack from wherever you are. All four are spent and gone, and no shop will buy them off you.
Two things to wear, and only two. Day 50 is The Tally Cord, a necklace that gains a knot for every ten days you have walked. Day 100 is The Long Road Circlet — beaten road-iron and one bead of amber, and no other account will have one for fifty days. One every fifty days after that, forever. Nothing you can wear is ever inside a box.
And the road does not end at a hundred. From day 101 the ladder settles into a ten-day circuit that repeats for as long as you keep walking, with a milestone every fiftieth day and something special waiting at a year.

27 August — Alchemy, and a fix for double-eaten fish

Alchemy: brew healing potions at any campfire. The eleventh profession is live. It uses the cauldron and the fire you already cook at, brews one potion per tick and never fails — but every potion is roots, herbs, berries and mushrooms with no fish in it, and each one spends an Empty Bottle blown at a carpenter's bench. Three draughts to start: the Roadside Tonic (Alchemy 0, heals 32% of your maximum health), the Greenwarden's Draught (20, 40%) and the Deeproot Philtre (45, 48%). Alchemy itself barely gates you — the real price of the stronger heal is the Foraging reach each ingredient list asks for.
A written Alchemy guide, in game and on the site. Every recipe with its exact level, heal and ingredient list, and where the bottles come from: menu → Guides, or the Alchemy guide here. The in-game guide list has been reordered so Mining, Smelting and Smithing sit directly under Combat.
Auto-food no longer spends two fish on one fight. A won fight has three ways into its post-battle breather, and an Once quick slot could be triggered by more than one of them — so a slot set to eat at 75% health sometimes ate twice. One fight now produces exactly one auto-eat, whichever route gets there first.
Queued food bonuses survive switching away from the game. Lining up several meals and then changing windows (or losing signal for a moment) used to empty the queue: the reconnect built a fresh character and the bonuses went with the old one. The queue is now handed across the reconnect with its clocks still running, so time spent away still counts down but nothing is thrown away. A server restart still clears temporary effects.
Auto Mine, Auto Smelt and Auto Smith respect "Match offline movement mode". Tapping a rock or a furnace is a mode choice, but only the movement menu was telling the offline mode about it — so a ticked box could leave you online mining coal and offline doing something else entirely. Every one of those shortcuts now sets both, with the exact ore or recipe. The furnace's Stop button stops the travel mode as well as the job.

26 August — The market comes to Wanderer's Rest

You can trade without walking to Crownwatch. The Exchange has opened a second counter on the Wanderer's Rest plaza. It is the same board, the same listings and the same coin — there is simply no longer a month of road between a new Wanderer and the market. Everything you could do at Vessa's counter in Crownwatch March you can now do at the stalls in the Rest: browse, list, buy, collect what sold and take back what did not.
Tap the stalls, or tap the clerk. Both plaza market stalls are now live — tap either one and the market opens. Ivet Halloway, the Exchange's clerk, keeps the east counter and does the same if you would rather ask a person. Crownwatch March is unchanged and Quartermaster Vessa is still on her floor.

24 August — Repair the gear you are wearing, at the bench

The bench's Repair tab now lists the gear on your back. It used to show only damaged pieces sitting loose in your pack — which is the wrong half of your kit, because worn gear is the only gear that wears at all. Every damaged piece you are wearing now appears on the list with an equipped tag, and can be repaired exactly where it is: with a spare copy, with the materials it was forged from, or with gold alone. Nothing has to come off first, and your armour never leaves you unprotected while it is being mended.
A lock has never stopped a repair, and now the screen says so. Locking a piece protects it from being sold or scrapped — it has always been repairable, locked or not, and it stays locked afterwards. What did read oddly was the sacrifice option: if the only spare copy you owned was locked, the bench said you had no spare at all. It now tells you the spare is locked, so you can unlock it or pay with materials or gold instead.

24 August — A second bag, and upgrades where you can find them

Your pack now has two tabs: Pack and Food. Everything edible — berries, mushrooms, fish, leaves, roots and every dish you cook — lives in its own Food satchel now, with its own capacity. The satchel starts at 30 slots, the same size the pack starts at, and fills up separately, so a morning's foraging can no longer crowd out the gear you went hunting for. Nothing moved anywhere you can't reach it: recipes, the forge and the Eat button all still find your food exactly where they did before.
Both bags are upgraded from the bag itself. "Expand Inventory" has left the Wanderer's Rest counter and become a golden + in the slot right after your last one. Tap it to see what the next five slots cost and buy them there and then — and unlike the counter, it works anywhere in the world, not only at the Rest. The Pack and the Food satchel each have their own +, on their own price ladder, so buying pack slots doesn't make food slots more expensive.
The Crownwatch Market's Sell list no longer goes stale. Collecting an item from Market Storage and switching straight to the Sell tab showed the list as it was before you collected, so the item you had just picked up simply wasn't there to list until you reloaded the whole game. Any change to your pack now refreshes it.

23 August — Market tabs stay put on a phone

The Crownwatch Market's row of tabs no longer collapses on a narrow screen. With a long list on the Browse or Sell tab, the tab row above it was being squeezed down to a sliver — on the Sell tab it disappeared almost completely — so there was no way back to Listings, Earnings, Storage or Tokens without closing the panel and reopening it. The tabs, the title and the Close button now always keep their full height, and the list between them scrolls instead.

21 August — Moderators can take a message down

An out-of-line chat message can now be removed by a moderator. Until now a moderator could warn or mute whoever sent it, but the message itself stayed on everyone's screen. They can now take one down directly — from the chat log, or from the recent-messages list on a player's profile. The line does not vanish: the sender's name and the time stay where they were and the words are replaced with "[message deleted by moderator]", so replies around it still make sense and nobody's history is quietly rewritten. Translations of that line are dropped with it, and a deleted message stays deleted after a reconnect. Deleting a message is housekeeping rather than punishment — it is not a warning and does not count toward an automatic mute, so a moderator who wants it on the record still issues a warning separately.

18 August — Quieter notifications

The pop-up messages under the HUD are smaller and less in the way. Every toast used to be drawn as a wide card that spanned a fixed width across the top of the world, whatever it said — so "+12 gold" took the same slab of screen as a full sentence, and a busy fight stacked four of them over the map. Each message now hugs its own text and sits in a slimmer chip: smaller type, tighter padding, a thin gold edge instead of a heavy bevel, a narrower accent stripe, and a slightly see-through background so the world still reads underneath. Colour coding is unchanged (green for gains, red for warnings, blue for a discovery, gold for a rare find), and server-wide announcements still arrive big, bright and glowing — they are the one message meant to be loud.

17 August — Repair from anywhere, and gear that never leaves your back

Gear that wears out no longer falls off — it just gets worse. A piece that reaches zero durability now stays equipped and contributes half its stats until you repair it, instead of unequipping itself into your pack. That was the worst part of the old system: an overnight hunt is hundreds of fights, so a set could wear through in the small hours and the rest of the night was fought with empty slots — you simply woke up dying to monsters you used to beat. One worn-out piece costs you that piece, not your set bonuses, which stay intact.
Repair for gold, from anywhere, on gear you are wearing. Every damaged piece now carries a Repair button — in your pack, on the item card, and on the character screen. It costs gold alone: no walk to a tempering bench, no materials, no spare copy, and no taking the piece off first. You pay only for the damage actually done, so a piece at 90% costs a tenth of a full repair, and topping up often is far cheaper than letting things rot. Repairing away from a tempering bench costs 50% more for the convenience.
The bench is still the cheap way. Nothing about tempering-bench repairs has changed — a spare copy or the piece's own crafting materials, plus the flat tier gold price, is still by far the cheapest route, and it is now the discount option rather than the only one.
Auto-repair, if you want it. A new toggle under the Inventory ⚙ button keeps your gear repaired for you: about once an hour it takes every worn piece carrying any damage at all back to full and takes the cost from your gold. Because you only ever pay for the damage actually done, topping up hourly costs no more than letting a piece wear down and paying for it later. It is off unless you turn it on, it never spends more than a quarter of your coins on a single piece, and it tells you what it spent. It skips anything you cannot afford rather than half-repairing it.
Three fixes to go with it. Gear that wore out overnight is now named in your welcome-back summary instead of going unmentioned. A piece the game had locked when it broke is no longer invisible in the bench's repair list — locks protect against selling, never against repairing. And durability now genuinely affects your stats: until today a worn-out piece you were wearing still gave its full numbers, so the whole mechanic could be sidestepped by re-equipping it.

17 August — Loot you can actually use

Auto-sell now clears out auto-equip's cast-offs. When auto-equip put on an upgrade, the piece it replaced went back into your pack and quietly stayed there — even when it sat below your auto-sell tier, so long hunts slowly filled your pack with junk you'd ordered sold. A piece displaced by auto-equip now goes through the same standing order as a fresh drop: if it's at or below your auto-sell tier (and not locked or protected by your keep-rarity floor), it's sold on the spot, and the toast tells you what it fetched. Manually swapping gear still keeps the old piece, and anything auto-sold can be bought back like any other sale.

16 August — Sharp on every screen

The game now renders at your screen's real pixel density. Phone screens pack 2–3 hardware pixels into every layout pixel, and the game was drawing at the lower figure and letting the browser stretch it — which is why names, levels and sign text went soft, especially zoomed out. At Native and High render quality the world is now drawn at full density (capped at 2× for battery), and floating labels rasterize sharper on top of that. The lower quality steps are untouched, so their battery savings are exactly what they were — if your phone runs warm, Settings → Graphics → Render quality still turns it down.

16 August — Dialogs behave on phones

The back button closes dialogs instead of the game. On Android, pressing back (button or gesture) with any screen, menu or dialog open now closes just that layer, one press per layer — it only leaves the game once nothing is left open.
Every dialog has the same ✕ in the same corner. Any screen you can dismiss now shows a close ✕ in its top-right corner, instead of some having one up top and others hiding a Close button below a long scroll.
The repair list turns pages. The tempering bench's Damaged gear list now shows six pieces at a time with Prev / Next buttons, so every damaged piece is reachable no matter how many you're carrying — nothing hides below the fold any more.

15 August — The world moves twice as fast

Walking speed is doubled everywhere. Players now cover one tile per second in the wilds and 1.3 tiles per second through towns, in every travel mode — and monsters wander, chase and flee at the same doubled pace, so the balance of a pursuit is exactly what it was. Distances haven't changed; they just feel half as far.

15 August — Battles look like battles

Your character actually swings. Fights now play real attack animations — a wind-up, a strike, and a coloured sweep that follows your equipped weapon's metal — instead of the old shuffle-forward-and-back. Monsters coil down before they pounce and rake their claws across you when a blow lands, elementals in their own colours.
You stand and fight. Your character no longer keeps walking (or rubber-bands) while their own battle is playing out — they hold their ground until the last blow lands, then travel on.
The outcome lands when the fight ends. The corner health bar now drains blow-by-blow with the battle instead of jumping straight to the result, and coins, loot, level-ups and drops arrive as the enemy falls — never mid-swing.
Blows read honestly. A hit your armour fully soaked now says Blocked (no more "-0"), partial soaks show how much was absorbed, big hits read Heavy!, and the Voidbound set's cling-to-life moment gets its own LAST STAND cue. A wounded legendary now enters the fight showing its real remaining health.

15 August — The tutorial ends on the road again

The opening quest closes with one more step. After equipping the Worn Shortsword, the chain now asks you to set yourself back to Explore and take the east road — so a brand-new wanderer finishes the tutorial travelling, not parked in Hunt mode outside town. The six extra pack slots and the world-preview scroll moved onto this final step; the chain pays exactly what it did yesterday overall, and anyone who already finished keeps everything.

14 August — A quieter first hour

The opening quest is three steps. Reach the wilds, switch to Hunt and defeat three monsters, then equip the Worn Shortsword your first kill always drops — and that is the whole chain. The closing "set out again" step is gone; its rewards, including the six extra pack slots and the world-preview scroll, now arrive when you equip that sword, so the chain ends on the moment you gear up and pays exactly what it always did.
Four coaching pop-ups have been retired. The Shop and travel-mode cards near Wanderer's Rest, and the "First victory!" and "A skill leveled up" cards, no longer interrupt the first few minutes. The quest chain already points at the mode button when it matters, and the level-up celebration already marks a new skill level.
New players no longer meet the News screen. Patch notes stop opening automatically on a brand-new account's first session; the 📰 button still opens them any time.
The opening quest can no longer stall. Reaching the wilds now counts from anywhere east of the East Road Waystone, so a wanderer whose route drifted off the road no longer walks straight past the objective and stays stuck on step one.

12 August — Denser bow recipes and steadier timber progress

Timber XP awards have a focused 0.9 pacing factor. Woodcutting, Sawmilling and Carpentry now award 10% less base XP; other gathering, processing and crafting professions are unchanged, and temporary XP boosts continue to multiply the resulting award normally.
Bows use real laminated recipes. Beech remains the one-wood starting bow. Hazel through Elderwood use 4 planks of their named wood and 3 from the previous tier; Pine and every later bow add 2 planks from a third, older tier.
Bow repairs follow the carpenter's recipe. Paying for a repair with materials uses exactly the same mix of planks as building that bow. Borrowing a metal equipment tier never turns its repair bill into bars.

12 August — Reward boosts reach every profession

The rewarded-ad 2× XP boost now doubles all ten professions. Mining, Woodcutting, Foraging, Fishing, Stonecutting, Smelting, Sawmilling, Smithing, Carpentry and Cooking all receive the same multiplier combat already did, on both successful work and failure consolation XP.
Banked boost time counts while away. Offline profession actions performed before the boost's expiry receive 2× XP; later actions return to their ordinary rate. Double XP Hour and other XP bonuses continue to stack independently.

11 August — Artisan's Hour

Processing and Crafting have a focused event of their own. During Artisan's Hour, success chances in Smelting, Sawmilling, Smithing, Carpentry and Cooking are multiplied by 1.3: a 10% chance becomes 13%, a 50% chance becomes 65%, and the result is capped at 100%. Recipes that already always succeed remain guaranteed.
It stacks cleanly with Sure-Handed Hour. If both events happen to be active, their multipliers combine while the final chance still cannot exceed 100%. Separate bonus-output and item-quality rolls keep their normal odds.

11 August — Sure-Handed Hour

A new profession event has joined the hourly rotation. During Sure-Handed Hour, every profession success chance is multiplied by 1.1: a 10% chance becomes 11%, a 50% chance becomes 55%, and the result is capped at 100%. Work that was already guaranteed remains guaranteed.
The boost covers the main success roll across the professions that can fail: Mining, Woodcutting, Fishing, Stonecutting, Smelting, Smithing and Carpentry. Separate bonus-yield and item-quality rolls keep their normal odds.

8 August — Gear wears out, and the bench repairs it

Equipment has a condition. A piece's maximum durability is its level requirement — Bronze holds 10, Frost 100, Legendary 250 — so better gear lasts proportionally longer. Every monster fight, each worn piece has a 10% chance to lose 0.1. Gear in the pack never wears, and Worn-tier gear, every tool and every cosmetic are indestructible. The bar shows in the pack, on the Character screen and on Exchange listings.
Introductory rate: ten times slower. Wear is deliberately running at a tenth of its design speed while players get used to the system, so a Frost piece currently survives around 10,000 fights rather than 1,000. Only the speed changes when the introductory period ends; the rest of the system is already final.
At zero a piece comes off, it is never destroyed. It unequips into the pack and can't be worn until repaired. With Auto-equip on, the best replacement goes on in the same beat.
Repair at the tempering bench, with no level requirement. Pay with either one spare copy of the piece (whatever condition it's in) or the exact materials it's forged from — a Frost weapon takes 3 Frost + 3 Silver + 3 Steel bars, literally its smithing recipe — plus gold at 100 × the piece's level requirement: Bronze 1,000, Frost 10,000, Legendary 25,000.
Every repair costs the piece 1% of its original ceiling, permanently. A Frost weapon tops out at 99 after one repair and 90 after ten. The bench states the exact loss before you commit, and the Exchange shows a listing's repair history, so a well-travelled piece can be recognised as one before you buy it.
Tempering is now priced by tier on the same 100 × requirement scale, instead of a flat 1,000 at every tier.

7 August — Every trade pays 30% more

All ten professions earn 30% more XP. Mining, Woodcutting, Foraging, Fishing, Stonecutting, Smelting, Sawmilling, Smithing, Carpentry and Cooking, with no skill left out and no exceptions inside a skill — every swing at a rock, every log, every bar, plank, blade, bow and bowl. The lift sits on top of the per-skill rates set by the Trades Update three days earlier rather than replacing them, so the relative standing of the trades is unchanged; they all simply pay more. Combat XP was not part of this pass.
And XP already banked was raised by the same 30%. As with the Trades Update, this was not a change from that moment onward: every point of XP sitting in all ten skills was scaled to match, so nobody who had been at the furnace for weeks started the day behind someone picking the skill up tomorrow. The pass handed out 187 levels across 37 players the instant it ran — most of them in Mining (46), Smelting (38) and Smithing (37) — and several people gained three levels in a single skill without touching the game.
No download, no reload. The change was entirely server-side, so it was simply there the next time anyone looked at their skills.

5 August — Auto Smith, and a forge that keeps its own time

Auto Smith This. Every recipe at the anvil now has a second button beside Smith, matching the one the rocks have always had. It sets your character smithing that item on repeat — walking to the nearest forge by itself, and continuing while you're offline — instead of making you tap once per item.
The forge makes one thing per tick, however fast you tap. Smithing was meant to be paced like everything else, and the animation was already timed for it, but nothing actually held taps to it: eight quick taps forged eight items, spent eight lots of bars and paid eight lots of XP in under a quarter of a second. The anvil and furnace now turn out one item per tick no matter how hard the button is pressed, and the button visibly rests between strikes. Walking to a forge, stopping a smelt, and switching to a different bar mid-smelt all still respond instantly.
And you can watch it work. The anvil and the furnace now fill a progress bar across the strike — the same one the tempering bench uses — with a hammer or a flame glowing beside it. The pause between items was previously just a button that had stopped responding; now the forge is visibly doing something with it. The bar appears directly beneath whichever recipe you're making, so it's on screen wherever you've scrolled to in the recipe book.
The furnace can smelt just one. Its single "Smelt" button was never a single smelt — it started a standing job that worked through everything you were carrying, which is a surprising thing for a button labelled "Smelt" to do and left no way to ask for one bar. There are now two: Smelt One and Auto Smelt This. The banner that appears while a smelt is running has been given a proper Stop button and sticks to the top of the panel, so it stays reachable however far down the bar list you have scrolled.
Craft results are no longer hidden behind the panel that made them. Notices like "Smithed a Bronze Dagger" were being drawn underneath the anvil and furnace screens — and the storage, market and AFK panels too — so the message you were waiting for was the one thing you couldn't see. They now sit on top of whatever screen is open, and remain click-through, so nothing they cover becomes harder to tap.

5 August — Two timed-event fixes

The event badge opens its explainer again. Tapping the unicorn badge — or any other event badge — showed an empty panel. Two different dialogs had ended up sharing one name in the page, so the badge was opening the wrong one, which had nothing in it. The badge now opens the explainer it was always meant to: what the event does, and how long is left.
Unicorn Hour transforms you the moment it starts. If an event began while you were already playing, you and everyone on screen stayed as you were until you reloaded — even though the badge, the announcement and the extra loot had all already arrived. The change now happens on the spot, and still turns itself back when the hour ends.

5 August — A loading screen that tells you what it's doing

The Wanderer screen now stays up for the whole start-up. Opening the game used to show the full interface almost immediately, with your name, health, coins and region all reading "Syncing…" while the artwork was still loading and the server had yet to answer. It looked like a finished game that had frozen. The title screen now stays put until your world is genuinely drawn behind it.
A real progress bar for the artwork. While the game's atlases download — about 9MB, and only on the first load after an update — the bar shows the true fraction fetched rather than an animation that means nothing.
It says when it is waiting on the server. Once everything is downloaded, the bar switches to a sweep and the screen reads "Waiting for the world…", because at that point there is nothing left to measure. If the wait passes eight seconds it says so plainly, and names the right cause — a slow download and a busy server are different problems.

4 August — The Trades Update

The ore chain earns 20% more. Mining, Smelting and Smithing all pay a fifth more XP per action, on top of the July increases.
The side trades earn considerably more. Foraging is up 20%, Fishing pays 3×, Stonecutting and Cooking 5×, Sawmilling 7× and Carpentry 10×. The multipliers scale with how much gathering and travel each skill demands before a single point can be earned.
Existing XP was raised to match. Every player's banked XP in all nine skills was multiplied by that skill's new rate in a one-off pass, so nobody who had already invested in a trade starts behind a player beginning today. The largest single jump was a Cooking 26 becoming a Cooking 37.
Listed XP now equals earned XP. The figures shown by the forge, sawmill, carpenter's bench and cooking pot are the figures actually banked; the two could previously drift apart. Worn cosmetic bonuses and event multipliers still stack on top. The Mining and Foraging travel-mode pickers were quoting pre-buff figures for the same reason, and now read from the same source the action itself uses.
Fourteen carpenter-built bows. One every 10 Carpentry levels from 10 to 140, each named for the wood it is cut from and matching that tier's sword for combat stats, with a six-tile engagement range. Built from three staves of their own wood plus one plank of each older wood as backing (3 planks of one wood up to 7 planks of five). Bows cannot be smithed — the carpenter's bench is their only source — and each has its own artwork.
Carpentry can fail, and can excel. The bench now rolls for success on the same curve as the anvil, salvaging about half the planks from a botched craft, and rolls for quality on the Standard→Relic ladder so bows can come out Rare or better.
Carpenter's mallets. Nine rungs from Beech to Pale Deadwood, raising success and quality odds from +0% to +34%. The first is cut with the woodcutter's axe you already own, and each one after that with the rung below it — held, never consumed. The Fishing Rod stays outside the tool gate.
Every bar in the Smelting picker. Smelting travel mode lists all 11 bar recipes as a recipe book, with locked and short-of-ore entries visible and explained, instead of hiding everything you could not make that moment.

July 2026

31 July — The Eastern Roads Update

Distinct foraging harvests. Bushes and mushroom patches now yield seven matching foods across Foraging levels 0, 20 and 40, with distinct names, colours and inventory icons.
Readable resource recovery. Bushes, mushrooms and stone nodes visibly change between ready and depleted states while regrowing, and their interaction sheen is subtler.
Production XP increased. Mining awards 20% more XP, Smelting 15% more and Smithing 10% more, on top of existing rewards.
Tiered fishing catches. River Trout, Silver Pike and Golden Koi unlock at Fishing levels 1, 20 and 40. Higher fish roll first, and every raw catch keeps for 24 hours.
Expanded campfire cooking. Ten new recipes turn fish and eastern forage into meals. Early healing is restrained, while the Cooking 25 and 50 feasts restore 25% and 30% of maximum health.
Distinct timber by tree. Every harvestable tree now has matching named logs and planks in 12-level Woodcutting steps, including Old Veyr's Pale Deadwood, with tiered sawmill recipes and revised house costs.
Directed gathering modes. Woodcutting and Foraging travel can target one unlocked resource with its requirement and XP shown; Any keeps the original nearest-resource behaviour.
Movement choices survive relocation. Death, teleports and reconnecting keep the selected movement mode, discard stale targets and choose a valid new route.
Optional weak-monster avoidance. Ordinary surface monsters can ignore players who are at least 30 combat levels stronger, while bosses, mini-bosses and instanced enemies remain aggressive.
Monsters got weaker. Health, attack, strength and defence have come down partway back toward their original levels, easing the midgame while keeping the eastern frontier substantially stronger than before the rebalance.
Reduced monster combat XP. Monster kills award 15% less combat XP across ordinary, boss, mini-boss and legendary encounters, including offline combat.
Broader high-tier loot. Azure-and-higher monsters now also draw from increasingly broad lower-tier gear pools alongside their matching set, without reducing the overall equipment-drop chance.
Aligned equipment progression. Gear requirements now match the Smithing level needed to forge the tier, and monsters can begin dropping it from 1.3 times that shared requirement.
Battle results wait for the finish. Boss and elite announcements, defeat screens and revival occur only after the matching battle animation has played.
Teleport scroll readouts stay current. A scroll now refreshes the displayed tile, distance from Wanderer's Rest and region together.
Revival respects your progress. Live and offline defeats wake you in the nearest unlocked town that is no farther east than where you fell.
Panels fit and behave. Character, Skills, Inventory and Shop stay focused on wide screens; News keeps its Close button visible, and tutorial tips wait for other dialogs.
Mining messages match both swings. Double-swing feedback distinguishes two hits, one hit and two misses, so its ore and XP agree with both independent rolls.
Every kill pays. The minimum monster coin reward is now 1 instead of 0.
Offline Explore knows its limits. It continues east only while the land ahead suits the player's level, and turns back before carrying them into overwhelming territory.
Tap outside to close. Tapping the world or shaded area closes dialogs, panels, settings, chat and the map without also sending the character walking.
Farlight Landing is open. The first town beyond the Forgotten Sanctum has a general store, forge, bounty board, three new faces and a long-silent great winch.

28 July — Stonecutting, house extensions, a bigger pack and food that goes off

Stonecutting — a new skill. The boulders, rock piles and loose rocks scattered across the world can now be worked with a pickaxe for Stone, a bulk building material. It behaves like mining rather than foraging: your pickaxe's tier drives both the success roll and the double-swing, a worked rock never runs out, and there's a Stonecutting travel mode that walks to the nearest workable rock and keeps at it. Ordinary rocks open at level 1, rock piles at 5, boulders at 10 and great boulders at 20.
Extend your house. A finished house can now be extended twice. Level 2 costs 1,000 Stone, 1,000 Logs and 1,000,000 gold and takes the storage cabinet from 10 items to 20; level 3 costs 3,000 Stone, 2,000 Logs and 3,000,000 gold and takes it to 30. There's no build timer — what you're buying is space, so it takes effect on the spot. Buy it from the house line in the store or at the building site itself.
Five more pack expansions. The Expand Inventory ladder no longer stops at 100 slots — it now runs to 125. The price keeps doubling, so these are deep end-game purchases rather than everyday ones.
Five more hours of offline travel. The offline-travel cap you can buy at the store rises from 12 hours to 17. Banked ad-boost time still stacks on top of that.
Your house is now on the shop counter. The whole build — level the land, build the house, then extend it — appears as one line in the store that always shows the next step, what it costs and how long it takes. You can still start it from the building site as before.
Raw Fish now spoils. A catch keeps for 24 hours and is then thrown away, in your pack or in your house cabinet. Each stack shows its own countdown, going amber in the last hour, and a stack is as old as its oldest fish — topping it up with a fresh catch does not reset the clock. Cook it or eat it before it turns.
The storage cabinet catches the light. Your house cabinet now has the same glow every other usable thing in the world has, so it reads as something you can tap.
Denser Inventory, Character and Shop screens. Item rows are about half as tall as they were: Use, Eat, Lock and Sell now sit on the same line as the item name, pushed right, and the text is sized to match the Skills screen. Six items fit on a phone screen where two and a half did before, and shop item names no longer get cut off mid-word.

27 July — Graphics controls, cooler phones & chat that speaks your language

A Graphics screen in Settings. Four presets — Ultra Low, Low, Balanced and High — plus a frame-rate cap, render quality, and individual switches for particles, weather, shadows, lighting, screen shake, object density and more. Nothing in it changes gameplay: it is purely how much work your phone does to draw the world.
Low-Power Mode. One switch that cuts effects, battery use, heat and graphical workload on phones that run hot or struggle. You can still fine-tune everything afterwards.
The game eases off when you're not looking. Minimised or in the background, it drops to a trickle of frames instead of drawing at full speed. Your idle progress carries on exactly as before.
Quest arrows never leave you stranded. A quest step inside a cave or dungeon now points back to the entrance whenever you are outside it, so dying to a boss no longer means hunting for the door.
Tap the quest tracker. Tapping the quest box on screen opens the full objective and its hint; the × still just dismisses it.
Chat translation follows your language. Switching languages now re-translates the chat you are looking at, instead of leaving it in the language you just left.
Chat translation works in every language. Only Spanish was actually being delivered — French, German and the rest silently timed out. All of them are live now.
Chinese messages translate properly. Short Chinese lines were being mistaken for Korean and came out as gibberish, or stayed in Chinese while claiming to be translated. Both are fixed.

23 July — Smelting becomes its own skill

The forge is now two skills, not one. Smithing used to cover both jobs — melting ore into bars at the furnace and hammering bars into gear at the anvil. The furnace half is now its own skill, Smelting, so the two can be balanced and levelled separately. Smelting a bar trains Smelting; forging gear or a tool trains Smithing.
Your old Smithing progress was split in two. Everyone's Smithing XP was divided evenly into the new Smelting and Smithing skills, so both start populated — no progress was lost, and your total skill XP is unchanged. You will see a few Smithing levels "disappear" into the new Smelting bar; that's the split, not a bug.
You keep every recipe you could already make. Even where the split drops you below a recipe's level, a grandfather rule keeps that recipe available — but your success and bonus-bar odds follow your real, current level, so the lost levels are worth re-earning.
Travel modes split too. "Smithing" auto-travel is now two modes — pick Smelting to run the furnace or Smithing to run the anvil.

21 July — Usable things now catch the light

Anything you can actually use now shows it. Ore rocks, choppable trees, cave mouths, fountains and wells, town noticeboards and bounty boards, and the forge's furnace, anvil and tempering bench all carry a faint green sheen that sweeps across them every few seconds — so a glance tells you what's worth tapping instead of hunting for it.
Hovering makes it obvious. Point at one and its sweep runs continuously and a little brighter, so you can sweep a busy town square and see what responds.

21 July — Gear recipe rebalance

Five gear sets now cost materials that match their tier. Ember, Shadow, Ivory, Ancient and Ashen were craftable from bars far below their rung — Ember (80) and Shadow (90) in particular were built from Steel, cheaper than the Aethersteel the tiers below them require. They now read: Ember = Aethersteel + Steel + Coal; Shadow = Aethersteel + Steel + Silver; Ivory = Starforged + Steel; Ancient = Starforged + Gold + Bronze; Ashen = Starforged + Aethersteel + 2 Coal.
They pay more XP to match. Smithing XP is weighted by the real ore behind a recipe, so these five now award 33–74% more per craft. Required Smithing levels are unchanged.

21 July — Announcements, tools & UI polish

Relic finds are announced to everyone. When any player obtains an Iron-tier-or-better Relic piece — from a drop, the forge, or the tempering bench — a server-wide banner celebrates it in glowing gold. Boss-kill announcements got the same treatment in blue, and both now sit longer on screen (and queue up if several land at once) so you never miss one.
Tools show their bonuses. Pickaxes, tongs and smith hammers now spell out exactly what each tier gives — Mine/Smelt/Smith success, Double Swing, bonus-bar and higher-rarity chances — instead of a generic description. Empty tool slots keep the plain "what goes here" hint.
Tempering: sort & filter your gear. The bench's gear list now sorts by Rarity (default), Value, Type or Name, and filters to a single gear type.
Tabs remember their own scroll. Character, Inventory, Skills and Shop each keep their own scroll position instead of inheriting the last tab's.

21 July — Manual travel by default

Manual is now the default way to travel. New and returning players start in Manual — stand still, tap to walk, tap a foe to attack — instead of automatically wandering east.
Your travel mode is remembered. Whatever mode you pick — Explore, Hunt, Mining, Smithing, and now Manual too — sticks across server restarts and reloads, so an update never resets how you're travelling.

21 July — The Crafting Update

Double Swing (mining). Every mining action can now swing twice in a single tick. Each swing rolls its own success, and the better your pickaxe and the more you've out-levelled a rock, the more often it fires.
Bonus bars (smelting). A successful pour can throw a second bar for free — one extra roll, so a pour gives one or two bars, never more. Better tongs raise the odds.
Higher-rarity forged gear. Forged pieces now start Standard and can climb Refined → Rare → Epic → Relic by chance. Forge above a recipe's level with a good smith hammer to improve your odds.

20 July — Tongs, hammers & moderation

Forge tools. Smelting now needs a pair of tongs and forging needs a smith hammer — each a Bronze→Celestial ladder that also raises your success rate. Every craft rolls for success, and a failed one salvages about half its materials.
Moderation tools. Warnings, mutes and auto-escalation, with mutes enforced across both in-game chat and Discord.

19 July — Supporter, cosmetics, a living world & loot

Supporter subscription (web). Back the game for $2.99/month.
Cosmetic slots. New hat and cape slots — stat-free, purely for how you look.
A more alive world. Daily bounty boards and interactive spots across 18 towns and waystations.
A second cave. The Understory, beneath Hollowbrook — behind a locked door and its single-use key.
Loot rebalance. Boss drops are now a chance rather than guaranteed, and the very top rarities are rarer at high level.

18 July — Cinematic, translations & offline XP

Opening cinematic. A 73-second intro now sets the scene for new wanderers.
Full translations. Simplified Chinese, Spanish and French are now complete.
Offline gathering XP is shown. The away summary now lists the XP you earned per skill (with a toast), closing a gap where mining/woodcutting XP looked missing.

17 July — Monsters, caves & performance

80+ monsters redesigned with fresh, bespoke art.
Caves arrived. The first underground system — Waykeeper's Hollow — opens off the road.
Hollowbrook rebuilt to the current town standard.
Phone performance. A frame-rate cap and low-power rendering options cut heat and battery drain, alongside server stability and speed improvements.

15 July — Smithing rebalance, tool slots & lock cleanup

Smithing XP is now resource-weighted. Every recipe's XP is computed from the total ore behind it — a Steel Bar (3 ore) finally pays properly against an Iron Bar (1 ore). One formula covers smelting, tools and gear; recipes now show their XP at the forge. Iron-tier rewards are unchanged; nearly everything between iron and endgame got a raise.
Pickaxes and axes are equippable. Two new tool slots on the character panel. Your best held pickaxe and axe equip themselves at login, freeing pack space — and tools keep working from pack or slot alike, so nothing interrupts an auto-mine.
Locking simplified. A locked stack can never be sold (tap-sell or Sell All), but now stacks and spends normally at the forge — the 🔒 means exactly one thing.

14 July — The Wanderer blog

The blog went live at /blog — patch notes, development diaries and world lore.

Early July — Castles, town walls & the market pass

Six regional castles now anchor the road — pulled up to the roadside and set into their towns' walls, replacing the old flat citadel sprites (8 July).
Town defences: an ongoing per-town wall pass is giving every settlement bespoke wall art — the first thirteen towns are done, from Wanderer's Rest out past Blackroot.
3D market buildings: town shops, inns and halls are being rebuilt one town at a time with dimensional building art, starting at Wanderer's Rest.
The Daybreak Line: a handcrafted set-piece scene at the old world's edge (4 July).
HUD and map polish: town coordinates on the world map, a readable distance pill, and monster levels displayed on a scale closer to player levels (6 July).

3 July — Zone 3: the road doubles

The corridor doubled in length. Sixteen new regions — from the Gilded Vale to the Forgotten Sanctum — with their own ground art, geography, and handcrafted features.
Fifteen bespoke settlements with NPCs; landmark set-pieces throughout.
Bestiary grown by 71 creatures with bespoke art; monster progression extended to level 400; sixteen new boss lairs with unique sprites; new regional music.
Ambient wildlife added across zones 2–3; scatter, groves and coastal props to liven the long stretches; civic-ruin texture for Old Veyr, Veyrath and the Sanctum.
The public website launched at playwanderer.online, with the game moving to /game/.

June 2026

26–30 June — The big balance week

XP curve halved — levelling is now twice as fast across all skills.
Equipment requirements halved — the gear ladder now runs level 1–250, with under-level gear wearable at reduced effectiveness (soft equip).
Drops reworked: monsters drop level-appropriate gear (three tiers around their level) on a fixed per-tier chance ladder.
Offline combat retuned: slower explore rate and honest fight durations, plus a fix for double offline catch-up on racing logins.
Monster art overhaul: bespoke silhouettes replacing recolours, element-tinted battle VFX, fixed sprite slicing/clipping; NPC art grew from 5 to 15 distinct roles.
Skill guides menu in-game; full smelting recipe book at the furnace.

Earlier

June's world redesign turned Wanderer's original radial map into today's single east–west corridor — the Long Road — with difficulty rising eastward. The full story of that decision is told in About Wanderer and on the blog.