We at Lost Pilgrims Studio want to wish you all Merry Christmas (or whatever else you celebrate in your neck of the woods at this time of the year) and a hopefully-much-better 2021 than this year has been globally! We hope that you are safe and well in these dark times.

Keep a weather eye on the horizon, as we'll continue working hard on Vagrus, releasing content and features continuously to be able to deliver a final game in 2021 that has the high quality we aim for as well as our quirky, unique touch. :)

The Vortex is a prominent point of interest on our chart and takes up a lot of space on our gigantic playable area in game. It has been a static item for a long time but when it came to adding the Deven region, we knew that we had to change that and give players something much better.

So here we are, a little later, looking at the new Vortex, resting our gaze on its forever swirling form. We are very satisfied with the result and hope that you are, too. Let us know what you think!

We have hinted at the rehauling of several Combat Skills recently, and we are happy to announce that these improvements made their way into the next build of Vagrus. Moreover, we ended up with many more skills that now work much better or are completely new than we had initially thought. Here are a few of these with some commentary:

One of the most requested additions by our Early Access players has been Companion progression for a while now, and it's no surprise. Being a party-based RPG at its heart, Vagrus has a roster of unique Companions that are your most trusty lieutenants with their own backstories, skills, and personalities. It is only natural that they can become stronger with time and effort - and we have naturally designed this progression system in the beginning, but we held off on adding it because there were a lot of specifics to work out and the EA experience functioned fairly well without it.

Fellow vagri! In this video, we touch upon one of the (many) improvements we have added to Companion combat: diminishing returns. In essence, Block and Evade will receive stacking penalties with each successful use. This will prevent some enemies to endlessly avoid damage (as well as players to abuse buffs, heh), drawing out some fights too drastically.

This time, we bring you a little teaser about the next area we are about to add to Vagrus, namely the twin salt basins north of the Crimson Gate and the Hills of Plenty. It includes - among other things - the town of Salum, where the Dragonlands is in control of a faltering salt mining operation and seems to be oblivious to certain issues surrounding it. Is someone hiding something? You'll have to dig deeper to find out. Or just harvest salt and try to get rich in the process.

Just a quick update: in line with our efforts to have more frequent content updates for Vagrus, we are getting close to releasing one that involves the salt flats of northeastern Jagged Waste. Expect endless expanses of white lake beds, a cruel 'work camp' with corrupt leadership, Dragon riders, faction politics, miners, clandestine conspiracies, spying, secrets, and salt. Lots of salt.

As seen in this short video, the option to flee from crew combat encounters has been added to Vagrus' latest build. No need to die against a horde of Jhakrae or a throng of Undead (or to load your game...). Run away and live to fight another day!

Fellow vagri! This is just a short video to demonstrate the recently updated Leader Status UI pane, which lists all the enduring status effects that belong to your character, the vagrus.

The Lost Pilgrims

Lately, we have been working on Crew Combat to further enhance its mechanics and the latest improvement is the 'Flee' feature. Let's check it out!

Flee!

Fleeing will now be added to a selection of Crew Combat encounters with the following considerations: