The time has come to sharpen your quills, dust off your scrolls, and return to your studies. Or, if you happen to live in the Riven Realms, perhaps also to sharpen your blades, inspect your beasts, and make sure your supplies will last until the next statio.

While there may not be a universally recognized academy capable of preparing someone for the life of a vagrus, surviving the wasteland requires a surprisingly broad education. A successful leader must be part explorer, merchant, commander, diplomat, warrior, and even historian. So, with the season of learning upon us, we thought we'd put together a rather unconventional curriculum.

In this article, we’re taking a closer look at the fixes and improvements introduced since the most recent major update, bringing together the key changes in one place. With the release of the Expedition storyline’s final chapter, we reached a major milestone for Vagrus, but our work on the game continues. Since its release, we’ve been steadily addressing community-reported issues, improving performance and stability, and polishing the experience through patches and hotfixes across all platforms. As of late, the focus was on campaign map movement and trade economics. You can jump to the list of changes at the end of the article.

The Riven Realms have a grim reputation for the many wastelands, deserts, and cursed locations inside their confines. However, even in such inhospitable environments, life has found a way to cling on. In some cases, new life has thrived, demonstrating an almost uncanny resilience and adaptability. This, however, is not a unique trait of the Riven Realms. Quite the contrary.

Hey everyone,

This update not only brings another round of fixes and tweaks, but also adds a lengthy quest called “The Gangs of Varnurud”, changes a location in the expansion, and introduces Fog of War to certain parts of At the Heart of Ruin.

Shoutout to Trese Brothers on Cyber Knights: Flashpoint

Before getting into 1.260, we’d look to mention our good friends at Trese Brothers, who’ve just hit a big milestone for their tactical RPG, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, released earlier this year, while also running a sale. This deep tactical RPG puts you in charge of cyberpunk mercenaries, sending squads on tense heights amidst the megacorps and crime syndicates of the 23rd century. Like Vagrus, it’s a challenging, complex game. It’s not an open world experience or narrative-focused, instead mixing hand-crafted content with clever procedurally generated systems and a huge variety of character build options, for extreme replayability. If you like games like XCOM or Shadowrun, this one’s worth a look!

‘I say: Dwarves! I’ve seen ‘em pass through ‘ere. Folks say they went up the way of the old fort inside the mountain, they did. Whass their business – nobody knows. Maybe in cahoots wif the Elves there? Aye, armor black as night, eyes aglow with malice, I tell ya. Murka said so, ‘fore he died. Poisoned, the poor wretch. Told ‘im not to go to Dum bloody Garok, but he was starvin’. Or uh… might’ve been the spiders, you see. Maybe them Dwarves are in cahoots wif ‘em? Anyhoo, are ya eatin’ that?’

Every once in a while in the debilitatingly hot locale that is Varnurud, the ground rumbles. Indeed, earthquakes are frequent to the point of becoming one of the most common sources of peril. But when the ground opens up, revealing an ancient Dwarven town, it’s really something special.

Gorge Town, the “creative” name the local scavengers have come to call it, represents one such special occasion, and today we’re eager to show it to you. It’s just one more place that you might find yourself delving into in our At the Heart of Ruin expansion via the new Exploration Encounters, and if you’re lucky, you can perhaps recover veritable treasures.

In the leadup to the release of At the Heart of Ruin on the 22nd of October (accompanied by the Ruinous Supporter Pack), we’ve already talked about new mechanics and features, like the updated throw-out or Exploration Encounters, but we thought it’s also time to touch upon the narrative and graphic art side of things.

What makes a great set of stairs, you might ask? Well, that’s a tough question, we say. In our At the Heart of Ruin expansion, there are many sets of great stairs, but only one is called the Great Stairs – at least that’s what the locals would say. Whether those locals are bloodletting miscreants who worship an unknown entity that demands depraved sacrifice, madmen who delight in the act of burning themselves and others alive, or men who believe themselves to be beasts after discovering a dead Wyvern that they thought was a divine creature of the skies, that’s what they would say. There are other… more cultured locals, of course – even ones that’ll talk to you – but they each share a different brand of insanity. Enjoy, we say.

We’re bringing you another locale this week, and this time it’s one of the many sites of grim ostentation that can be found throughout our upcoming At the Heart of Ruin expansion.

But what do we mean by grim ostentation? The answer can be found with the Wasteland Stalkers and their strict hierarchy. Stalkers’ ranks within the brood depend on the beasts they have slain, and most of their trophies can be found within the forum itself. Here, there are skulls of beasts and men alike, an unnerving offering of grim-faced reptiles, deadly serpents, and terrifying foes.

Today we have another teaser for you in the form of character art – an essential component of our upcoming At the Heart of Ruin expansion, where many new humanoids, beasts, creatures, and anomalies are set to be introduced. And yet, this one is hardly ostentatious; it does not aim to dazzle or inspire fear, but simply to show you one of the various factions of authority that exist in Scrapheap, the focal point of many coming adventures.