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.

Last week marked the third occasion that the annual Turn-based Thursday Fest showcased some of the best turn-based indie-games on the market. There were hundreds of participating RPGs, sims, grand strategy games, deckbuilders, 4X games, roguelikes, puzzlers, city builders, and much, much more to choose from. This year it was even bigger and more spectacular than the previous years, presenting well-known games such as Baldur’s Gate 3, showing that turn-based games are still very much “in”. 

Fellow vagri,

2024 is coming to its inevitable end and so we are closing the books on this year’s adventures as well. For this occasion, we thought we’d look back on the past year and list some of the things that happened around Vagrus before signing off.

How It Started

We kicked off 2024 with a post about our plans for the year. In retrospect, wanting to release smaller bits of content at intervals while developing two very content-heavy DLCs with our tiny writing team was wishful thinking. Why it did not exactly pan out like that also involved a lot of other factors, like the many, many other aspects of the game we’ve worked hard to improve. Also, it seems that there’s no such thing as “smaller bits of content” when it comes to Vagrus. With millions of words worth of written content behind us, everything is interconnected and adding things can be very tricky. Also, players now expect meaty additions, so just any odd small story just won’t cut it. Still, this effort gave us Clandestine, so it was not in vain.

You heard it right: it’s back and it’s no surprise we’re involved. Lost Pilgrims Studios is delighted to work alongside some of the best indie developers in the industry to bring the Fest back. This time we’re in partnership with a slew of talented devs, including Terra Randoma, Trese Brothers (Star Traders: Frontiers & Cyber Knights: Flashpoint), Unleash the Giraffe (Seer’s Gambit & Obsidian Prince), and Curious Dynamics (Folk Emerging), who have been heartily involved with organization this time round.

'You have taken our herd-brother captive, two-legs. Now you either trade him back to us or face the wrath of my tribe. I would think twice before you answer. When irked, we are not unlike Kal-dai-Ruhk, Great Spirit of the Eternal Wastes, when he summons his calamitous gales to wipe away whole cities.'

- The Kal-rish traveling merchant Ku-ro-Rath bargaining for his kin's life with a soon-to-be destroyed outpost's magistrate

The province of Tark was formerly a sovereign country conquered and assimilated into the Empire. It has always been a region of vast deserts and arid mountains. Its people are a hardy folk who were already adapted to a life in barren lands, which allowed them to easily adapt to the many new deserts on the continent after the Calamity. Thus, a lot of them are natural explorers and traders - but quite a lot of them are mercenaries.

Those of you who have played the game extensively surely know Deven, the great Imperial city that occupies vast caverns beneath the arid and hot Jagged Waste. It is a regular stop for many traders, wanderers, and vagri. Although the subterranean location is protected from the scorching sunlight of the surface, it is in turn enveloped in perpetual twilight only broken by the many braziers and luminous crystal clusters.

Tor'Zag's Shelter is a vast, dark city in the belly of the Blackblood Mountains, carved out mostly by Imperials after obsidian became scarcer in the region and the fleeing armies of Warleader Tor'Zag, an Orc general, capitulated, leaving the tunnels beneath the mountain at the end of the Orc War. People who lost everything came here to share respite from the scorching sun of the Jagged Waste with traders who were looking to establish a way-station between Deven in the north and the Province in the south. Now, a couple of hundred years later, the Shelter is among the five greatest cities of the continent.

One of the last big additions to Vagrus' Open World Campaign that is now coming very close to being released is the character creation sequence at the start of the game. That is the feature that allows you to customize and set up your own vagrus by selecting a variety of options in subsequent steps. To give a quick idea of the many amazing options, here's a little rundown:

Markets and bazaars are the throbbing heart of the rebuilt cities of the Riven Realms. Due to the isolation of many settlements and regions thanks to the Calamity, trade - propagated mostly by comitati - is key to the survival of these regions and thus to the survival of the Empire.