After a road that was almost as long and arduous as that of Kharandar and his merry band of explorers, we have finally reached our destination: the closing chapter of the Expedition storyline is now available to all owners of At the Heart of Ruin! The free content is accompanied by a slew of performance improvements and tweaks, which we believe, improve the games significantly.

The Heart of Ruin

The arrival of the final chapter means that the story of Kharandar’s expedition is now coming to an end, and with it, no new content is planned for the last expansion. Hopefully, the epic ending we’ve built up to will be as much fun for you as it was for us to craft it. It has action, drama, amazing and terrifying locations, as well as discoveries and lore for those of you interested in the world of the Riven Realms. It will also have its own victory slide at the end of a campaign, which hints at its importance as a storyline. We really poured everything into this one, as a gift to an amazing community that’s been with us since the beginning.

Take heed, however, that the Expedition is absolutely endgame content, and it will only be possible for veteran vagri with an abundance of resources and upgrades. In turn, it rewards successful explorers with some of the best possible gear in the game.

This also marks the ending of our development of At the Heart of Ruin, which, along with all the additional, free content we have produced for it, has grown to be our largest DLC, even if the actual territory is smaller than that of Sunfire and Moonshadow. In any case, if you’ve been holding out to experience the whole of the Expedition storyline in one go, you have to wait no longer.

Optimization and Performance

Alongside this final chapter, we're also releasing one of our largest optimization updates as of yet. Over the past months, we've focused heavily on improving performance throughout Vagrus, with major optimizations to combat, settlement interiors, and numerous other areas of the game. Combined with a wide range of fixes, balancing changes, and quality-of-life improvements, we hope this makes this new version the smoothest and most enjoyable way to experience the Riven Realms. Additionally, many achievements will now be calculated better and even unlocked retroactively for those who missed them due to glitches.

Feedback

Finally, as we approach the end of this long journey, we'd like to ask one small favor. If you've enjoyed your time with Vagrus, please consider leaving us a Steam review – it helps more than you might imagine. And if you know someone who would enjoy exploring the Riven Realms, now is the perfect opportunity to tell them about the game, as the Steam Summer Sale is currently offering discounts of up to 50% across Vagrus and its DLCs.

We’re incredibly grateful to all of you who have traveled the Riven Realms with us over the years. Your feedback, encouragement, and passion have shaped Vagrus into the game it is today, and we truly couldn't have done it without you.

And with all that said, it is time to take a look at the patch notes, which you can find below.

Important Note: Considering the extent of the improvements, there is little to no chance that we broke nothing in the process. Assume that we did not want to make anyone's life harder. If you see something amiss, please flag it to us using the usual channels, like the inbuilt reporting tool (F1 button), forums, and our Discord server.

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Expedition Part IV. (Update 1.3000706Z)

New Content

• Final Chapter: The closing chapter of the storyline concerning Kharandar’s expedition was added (you can pick up the thread in Camp ‘Overlook’ if you’ve been following closely), which includes a new map section.
• Endings: Ending slides were added in connection to the Expedition storyline.
• Rewards: Several new Gear and Equipment type rewards were added specifically to the questline.
• Foes: Two entirely new enemies were added – they only appear at the end of the Expedition storyline.

Combat & AI Improvements

• AI Speed: Significantly improved Companion and enemy combat AI processing speed, particularly for enemies utilizing complex move-and-skill combinations (for example, Ghouls).
• AI Targeting: Resolved multiple bugs where the AI failed to target Downed or low Vitality characters.
  • Enemies will now properly target Downed characters with standard attacks and Push/Pull Skills.
  • Fixed an edge case where the Moloch and similar large enemies ignored Downed targets.
• Downed Recovery & Regeneration: Fixes to how Downed Vitality works.
  • Downed characters now automatically stand up when healed to their maximum Downed Vitality.
  • Fixed an issue preventing the Regeneration Perk effect from ticking while a character is in the Downed state.
• Cover Mechanic: Re-enabled the intended +1 Armor bonus while in Cover (applied when a character is behind an obstacle or another character and is targeted by a Line of Sight type of Ranged Skill).
• Critical Hits: Critical hits now count the target's Armor less by 1 during the attack. This effect now applies to both characters and obstacles.
• Mitigation Rework: The Precise, Penetrating, and Overpowering Perks no longer completely nullify the corresponding defenses. They have been converted to graded reductions as follows:
  • Precise: Reduces Evade by 60% against the attack (previously 100%).
  • Overpowering: Reduces Block by 60% against the attack (previously 100%).
  • Penetrating: Reduces Armor by 3 against the attack (previously reduced Armor to 0).
• The Incorporeal Perk still nullifies defenses completely.
• Blocking: The Block Armor Bonus (+1 Armor) now applies to any successful Block and is no longer suppressed by Skills with the Overpowering Perk.

Performance & System Improvements

• Asynchronous Saving: Saving is now asynchronous, significantly reducing loading times when leaving settlements or during camping.
• Tile Loading Buffer: The game now waits for campaign map tiles to fully load when returning from combat encounters, preventing the node grid from temporarily appearing over a blank map on slower devices.
• Settlement Optimization: Implemented general performance improvements when entering settlements and navigating menus within them.
• Steam Achievement Fix & Reconciliation: Fixed an issue where Steam achievements were marked complete in save files but failed to sync to Steam due to hardware crashes or cloud failures. Added a reconciliation system to retroactively unlock affected achievements.
• Hard Mode Achievement Tracking: Hard mode achievement eligibility is now tracked in the game log. The log will reflect whether mandatory curses were taken in time, and will post a notification if a required curse is dropped, rendering the achievement permanently unattainable for that playthrough.
• Performance Telemetry: Added background performance monitoring and logging to help pinpoint frame drops. Note: Enabling "Send Crash Reports" on the disclaimer screen helps transmit these logs to the team.

Campaign & Economy Tweaks

• Camp Guard Calculation: Members of Passengers who are counted as Fighters are now deducted from the total number of crew that require protection during camping. They do not act as active guards, but they no longer count as non-combatants who need to be protected.
• Passenger Enchantment Rules: Passengers can now possess the Enchanted attribute. Because Passenger members are not tracked individually, either the entire group is considered Enchanted or not at all.
• Warehouse Management: The "Withdraw All" function in the warehouse now properly respects comitatus Cargo limits and will no longer fill overflow space.

Events & Texts

• Various smaller Event script fixes, especially in At the Heart of Ruin.
• A number of typos, mistakes, and stylistic errors were corrected in various in-game texts.

UI, Localization & Media

• Korean Community Translation Pack: Thanks to Kim Tae-yi, a player-made Korean community language pack has been published on mod.io. While still a work in progress, it offers a massive upgrade over the default machine translation. We highly encourage all Korean players to subscribe to it and share feedback to help the community refine it further.
• UI Overlay Fix: Fixed a rare bug where the Mercenary Event UI could open directly on top of the Crew Combat UI.
• Effect Properties: Tooltips now clearly indicate effect requirements. In combat, these dependencies are color-coded to show whether they are currently met or not.
• Trailers: Added subtitles to the Intro and At the Heart of Ruin trailers.
• Localization Updates: Fixed and updated text templates, UI elements, and tutorials in several localizations (primarily focusing on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian languages).
• Extras&Background Localized: Localized the Extras Menu and the Background Art selection screen.

As ever, more is coming, so stay tuned and conquer the wasteland!

- The Lost Pilgrims Team

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