Update 1.42.0

Two old hands in town have taken on new work. Tom will make your weapon better, if you can leave it with him for a day, and Gandalf will teach the spells you already know a second trick. The auction now takes gold, friends can talk in group chats, and four familiar monsters come back rebuilt.

You must update your client to log in. Close the game and the launcher, then reopen the launcher and press PLAY. On Steam the update is automatic.

New

Tom's Forge. Tom now improves the weapon you already own. Press Forge in his menu (it replaces Talk), drop in an unequipped weapon and pay the gold and materials. Tom keeps the weapon for 24 to 36 real hours: the button reads Working in the meantime and Collect when it is done, and a badge in the corner tells you it is ready. Nothing can fail and nothing breaks. The weapon comes back with its +N, prefixes and durability intact, and a bound weapon stays bound. One order at a time per account, and an order cannot be cancelled. 85 melee weapons qualify — daggers, short swords, fencing weapons, long swords, axes and hammers. Bows, wands, unique items and the Knight line do not.

Weapon quality climbs one step at a time. Superior is now called Masterwork and Exceptional is now Perfect; the weapons you already own keep their quality under the new name.

• Masterwork: +1 damage, +5 level requirement, +4 Str for full swing. 50,000 gold, 24 h, 1 Blonde Bar, 2 Iron Bar, 10 Iron Ore, 5 Coal.
• Perfect (from Masterwork): +2 damage, +15 level requirement, +8 Str for full swing. 100,000 gold, 24 h, 1 Mithral Bar, 2 Gold Bar, 1 Ultra Coal, 10 Iron Ore, 5 Coal.

A Perfect weapon can then take one property. Properties work on physical hits with the weapon, never on spells. Forging a different one costs the full recipe again, and the old property is lost for good; the Perfect quality stays.

• Indestructible: your hits no longer wear the weapon down. It does not protect against Merien's Plate Mail. 300,000 gold, 24 h, 1 Gold Bar, 2 Silver Bar, 2 Blonde Bar, 3 Ultra Coal.
• Benevolent: when an allied player (same nation or same party) dies within three tiles of you, +15% damage for 20 seconds. 120-second cooldown. 250,000 gold, 27 h, 2 Silver Bar, 2 Blonde Bar, 3 Ultra Coal.
• Cruel: +15% damage when you strike from behind. 400,000 gold, 30 h, 2 Gold Bar, 2 Silver Bar, 4 Ultra Coal.
• Vicious: +10% damage, and you take 10% of the damage you deal. It never takes you below 1 HP. 600,000 gold, 33 h, 1 Mithral Bar, 3 Gold Bar, 4 Ultra Coal.
• Dispelling: each damaging hit has a 5% chance to strip one beneficial buff from the target, Protect spells first, then Berserk, Invisibility and Haste. 60-second cooldown, spent only when something is actually removed. Works on players and monsters. 1,000,000 gold, 36 h, 2 Mithral Bar, 3 Gold Bar, 1 Diamond, 5 Ultra Coal.

Masterwork and Perfect weapons no longer drop from monsters or come out of the water. The forge is now the only way to get one.

Spell Ascension. Gandalf, in the Magic Tower, now has an Ascend button next to Learn (Talk is gone from his menu). It lists the spells you have learned, grouped by circle. Ascending is permanent, belongs to that character and cannot be undone — and clicking a row pays and ascends on the spot, with no confirmation step, so choose before you click. Each spell asks for Mag equal to 20 × its circle or its own Int requirement, whichever is higher (at most 200), a Magic skill of 40 + 6 × its circle, and 30 times its shop price in gold: from 3,000 for Create-Food to 1,350,000 for Mass-Magic-Missile. Angelic Mag counts toward the requirement, and you have to be inside the Magic Tower.

The Mag requirement also applies when you cast: if your Mag drops below it, the spell goes out in its normal form, and the ascension is still yours once you are back above it. Scrolls and wands never carry an ascension.

Thirty spells can ascend: Create-Food, Staminar-Drain, Celebrating-Light, Fire-Ball, Great-Staminar-Recovery, Summon-Creature, Invisibility, Detect-Invisibility, Paralyze, Cure, Tremor, Fire-Field, Lightning, Great-Defense-Shield, Berserk, Mass-Poison, Spike-Field, Mass-Lightning-Arrow, Mass-Heal, Energy-Strike, Mass-Fire-Strike, Mass-Chill-Wind, Earthworm-Strike, Scan, Mass-Confusion, Mass-Ice-Strike, Cloud-Kill, Lightning-Strike, Meteor-Strike and Mass-Magic-Missile. A taste: an ascended Fire-Ball has a 50% chance to land a second, free Fire-Ball; Great-Defense-Shield returns 10% of the melee damage you take; Paralyze leaves its victim taking 10% more damage from every source; Mass-Magic-Missile skips the Magic Resistance roll, though AMP still stops it. Every spell's tooltip now spells out its ascended version, in gold once it is yours and in gray, with the Mag it needs, until then. New status icons above the HUD show these effects with a countdown, with a red border on the harmful ones.

The auction takes gold. When you list an item, choose whether it sells for EVO Coins or gold, up to 9,999 EVO Coins or 9,999,999 gold. Bids, purchases, payment to the seller and refunds all move in the listing's currency; the listing fee is still paid in gold and has not changed. The browser has a currency filter, large gold prices are shortened in the list, and the exact amount now appears in the detail panel and in My Bids, My Listings and History. The price field takes seven digits, and the level filter takes three, so level 100 and up can finally be searched.

Group chats. Create a named chat for up to 20 players, and belong to up to 8 of them. Only the creator invites; anyone can mute it or leave, and if the creator leaves, the longest-standing member takes over. Group chats live in the whisper window, below your one-on-one conversations. From your friends list, double-click a friend to whisper, or click once to invite them to your party, add them to a chat or remove them. Friend requests and party and chat invitations now wait in a single inbox with Accept and Decline, counted on the Friends button, and they no longer pop up in the middle of the screen: a bell sounds and a line goes to the feed. Unread messages get their own Chats button.

Changed

• A monster you are fighting stays on you now. Monsters no longer hit and back off at random, missing a monster counts as fighting it, and it keeps chasing you for 30 seconds after your last attack instead of 8. After that it heads home, as before.
• Dungeon L2 was the emptiest map in the game. It now holds nearly three times the creatures, thirteen species instead of seven, and difficulty climbs as you walk away from either entrance toward the stairs down to Dungeon L3.
• Battle Axes now drop from Demons, Unicorns, Gargoyles and the rest of the high-tier monsters at the same rate as Giant Swords and Battle Hammers.
• Stone of Xelima on weapons that already carry a +N in their name: the upgrade chance now starts from that +N, and the ceiling is +7 counting it. A Falchion +2 rolls its first upgrade at 25% instead of 35% and can reach +5 through upgrades. Weapons already past the ceiling keep what they have but cannot go higher.
• Bane: damage from 12 to 27.
• Knight Rapier, Knight Great Sword, Knight Flamberge and Knight War Axe: damage from 6, 11, 13 and 9 to 9, 15, 17 and 13. Their prices rise to 5,000, 8,500, 10,000 and 4,500 gold.
• Devlin Shield, Superior Devlin Shield and Exceptional Devlin Shield: defense from 10, 12 and 14 to 24, 27 and 30.
• Level requirements raised: Hat of Divinity from 40 to 120, Greed Leather from 45 to 85, Bastard Sword from 0 to 30.
• The 1/3 Zemstone left behind by a Zemstone of Rebirth is an ordinary stone again — you can drop it, sell it, and it is spent the next time you die. Using a Zemstone of Rebirth while alive now leaves the 1/3 stone its tooltip describes.
• The launcher and in-game messages now use the HB Evolution name.
• The language flags now show Argentina for Spanish and Brazil for Portuguese. The 90 EVO Coin pack now lists its bonus as +4, the 94 coins it credits.

Improved

• The Troll, the Werewolf, the Stalker and the Unicorn have been rebuilt in 3D with far more fluid animation, and Gandalf has a new look. Worth another look on your next hunt.
• The minimap is redrawn from the world itself at four times the resolution. Player, party and guild dots are readable over any terrain, the white dots for teleports and building entrances are back (zoomed view included), and creature icons are drawn from each monster's own artwork — twenty-one creatures that never showed up at all, Rudolph and the Unicorn among them, finally have a face.
• The Log In, account and Create Character screens have been rebuilt in the same black marble and gold as the rest of the interface, with one button style across every screen and all six languages, and they keep their shape at every window size. Buttons in game dialogs share the same plate, and disabled ones no longer turn into a flat gray box.
• Every weapon's tooltip now opens by naming the talent it trains, and lights up when that talent is one of yours. Daggers and short swords share the Short Sword tree; sabres, esterks and rapiers are Fencing.
• Light weapons like the Pick Axe, the Hoe and every wand now show the Str you need to reach full swing speed.
• The character sheet's accessory slots now fit what they hold: the tutelary angel sits in an oval at the top right, rings sit fully inside their circle, and the two turn arrows are now a single turn button.
• Running plays as one continuous stride, and your footsteps keep their rhythm when you change direction.
• Loot notices end with how full your bag is, turning orange as you near the free slots you told auto-pickup to keep and red on the last item it will take. When an item stays on the ground because of that limit, you are told.
• The marble floor of the City Hall, the Guild Hall and the Cathedral now ends where it looks like it ends, and its rim is a clean edge. Dirt patches no longer show a green outline where they meet grass.

Fixed

• Fishing rods no longer wear out — and rods that had already broken work again.
• Ore you mine, crops you harvest and gems you pull out of the water now arrive as a proper stack and keep piling up as you gather.
• Weapons that drop already upgraded show their +N as a bonus: a Hammer +2 now reads 14+2 instead of 16.
• Walking past a mineral no longer stutters, and hovering one no longer shows "Lv. 0".
• The Sell and Repair All windows close when you leave the shop or the blacksmith.
• The guild warehouse keeps its scroll position when you deposit.
• Renaming a character no longer loses the attachments waiting in its mail.
• The Change Password dialog shows its title in your language, and text in the Log In fields sits centered.