We come to you this week with two pieces of media, especially for those interested in the heart behind Vagrus – our studio lead and producer Gábor Szutorisz, and our creative lead Gergely “Geri” Mácsai. Both were recently featured on the popular Hungarian gaming podcast Checkpoint, where they recorded their thoughts in Hungarian.

Hey everyone,

This update brings with it the machine translated texts for the entirety of At the Heart of Ruin at last! Thanks to all of you for your patience – we know this took a bit long, but it proved trickier to implement than we had anticipated. Hopefully, now those of you who’ve been waiting for it can enjoy the expansion, too.

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.

It’s not often that a post introduces two important, named characters, but today is one such day, since both Kharandar and Dralla will be integral figures in our coming expansion.

First off, there’s Kharandar – a man of action and intent. A stalwart, even noble, leader. He is the one who speaks in the expansion’s trailer. Those who follow him trust his decisions and instincts above all others. They know that when push comes to shove, Kharandar will be there, calling the shots for everyone’s benefit.

Today’s location teaser is none other than the dark chasm of the Wound, a terrible place where travelers dare not go, and oft-times where nightmares are made manifest. True to its name, the gouge in the land glows with a conspicuous crimson light and its walls appear covered in blood or viscera. Travelers who have surveyed its length say it is more than fifteen miles long, the plunging chasm within its confines ranging between one hundred and two hundred yards in depth.

Unsurprisingly, Varnurud is home to many settlements, fastnesses, and facilities once occupied by Dwarves and their Inventor Kings during the last centuries of the Third Age of the Riven Realms. Since mines were common, so too were satellite towns, of which Ember Town is one.

As the day’s heat settles over the deserts and arid wastelands of Xeryn, travel becomes even more treacherous. In Vagrus, several game systems represent or contextualize this – Vigor loss, Movement Point costs (that include difficulty from “climate”), and even Events that deal with the hardships or challenges presented by scorching weather. In our upcoming At the Heart of Ruin expansion, the heat will be turned up even more. The Mountains of Fire might not be beaten by the cruel sun all day due to the blanket of ash obscuring the skies, but volcanic activities take care of raising temperatures to even greater extremes.

Patch 1.2100717/21 Codename: Dead Weight(less)

Performance Improvements

• We optimized the sizes of several art assets, resulting in smaller install size and a bit quicker load times.
• Slight Companion Combat performance improvement against certain enemies

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a rare issue that caused summoned/spawned Companion Combat entities to remain permanently in your comitatus (no more parasitic Deadweight!).
• Fixed an issue that caused Equipment drag&drop to drag the wrong piece of Equipment.
• Fixed an issue that misaligned Gear icons with names in their list on the Character Sheet.
• Fixed an issue that prevented loading save files in Dissonance mode.
• General controller-related improvements based on your Discord feedback.

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

This week we’re coming to you with another teaser, this time of the elemental variety. As you might know, the elements, specifically fire and earth, are closely tied to our At the Heart of Ruin expansion, and the proliferation of elementals that personify these elements comes about largely because of the spirits of these lands, destined to suffer and be consumed by rage. This is the sad legacy of the Calamity.

Hey everyone,

While work on the upcoming DLC (or rather, expansion: At the Heart of Ruin) is ongoing, the team at Lost Pilgrims is also busy fixing bugs and adding performance improvements. This patch includes several of both, with some added love to controller support. We’ve also thoroughly optimized our asset handling, freeing up a whopping 1.5 Gigabytes of hard drive space.