My minions,

Finally the day of 1.6 has come, well, it's only beta but still, beta has come! ;)
You'll find all the downloads on https://te4.org/beta-test

Please, try to keep all bug reportings on ToME's official forums at http://forums.te4.org/ as it is hardly feasible for me to survey 10 different location for bugs.

The current DLCs will still work in 1.6 so you can test with those but they will each get a small update at the same time as the final 1.6 release to update how they process melee talents to be inline with the new 1.6 way.

Please do note this is *not* by any stretch of the imagination a full changelog. The 1.6 release contains so many changes and updates that it'd turn me mad organizing them into a semblance of changelog and it'd turn you mad reading it all.
The original unabridged log is about 3500 lines long.

One last thing for those new to betas; characters will NEVER validate in beta; that's normal and as usual importing characters across major releases is bound to not work all too well.

• When a yeek exits the tunnels to the halfling complex and sees subject Z; a warning comes up from the wayist, urging you to flee
• When a shader is missing, it'll use a default fallback (prevents loading game with missing DLCs/addons)
• Classic UI can now cancel buffs by right-click
• Load quickhotkeys prior to loading the game to fix hotkey ordering for "restart the same character".
• Greatly revised celestial positive spells and a few negative ones
• Disable fatigue for positive and negative energy
• Updated/rebalanced some NPCs
• Revised Defilers
• Added an UI option to sharpen the map display, as requested by some
• Removed max level on all fixed artifacts. Material level already restrains them. This prevents some artifacts being near un-obtainable on higher difficulties
• Fixed an issue preventing users with a too long password from login in. Woops sorry :/
• Cunning techniques revisions
• Greatly revised Summoners
• Buff Giant Leap
• Improve Elemental Surge
• Significantly revise 2H Assault
• Fix NPCs shoving the player
• Teleports now immediately maximize the AI's guess spread on your current location
• Ethereal Form uses highest of Dex or Mag for its defense bonus
• Rebalance Elemental Harmony
• Revise many artifacts, egos, randarts and items
• Revise Arcane Blade's Enhancement tree
• Reduce Arcane Destruction damage and fix type to Arcane
• Fix Glove display
• Fix Adept causing infinite talent levels
• Sustains will not disable at 0 Stamina or Mana anymore, as it is cumbersome and is easily prevented with a little regen anyway
• Fix Slings not having a base speed
• Add stairs up to Dark Crypt
• Fix Elemental Harmony allowing self damage
• Allow respeccing out of combat
• Add a talent autouse for being out of combat
• Multiple updates to combat damage log
• Fix light radius letting Players (but not NPCs) see beyond their max vision radius
• Resize and reposition how charges are displayed on effects
• Several talents that move the player would not function at all or would behave unusually if auto-accept target was enabled.
• Greatly revised inscriptions (runes & infusions)
• Greatly revised the early game combat to make melee start less painful
• Revise accuracy bonuses to have more impact and nicer breakpoints
• Revise shield/glove combat table tooltips
• Born into magic now actually gives 20% inc dam as advertised(up from 15%)
• Change Stone Vines' and Rockswallow's damage to Nature and removed speed malus from Stone Vines
• Revise some racial talents
• Round most talent masteries to 0.0 or 0.3
• Add many, many base character visual customisation options (beards, hairs, skin color, tatoo and so on)
• Implement support for cosmetic & "useless fun" microtransactions
• Revise Scoundrel and add it to the Rogue escort
• Redesign the Vim resource (no more ability refund; Vim regeneration on any kill scales faster with Willpower and now also scales with target rank; Bloodcasting is now baselined in the resource allowing you to pay Vim costs with 200% of the cost as life)
• Added an UI option to sharpen the map display
• Fixed a bug preventing steamsaw/guns from generating as egos for randbosses (amongst other things) (yes fear the gunsnakes!)
• Small revisions to Archmage
• Update Worldly Knowledge to only include most of the currently available escort/quest trees
• Remove defense penalty from block
• Miscelanous revisions to many talents
• Revise Antimagic
• Major AI update, smarter, better, maybe faster
• Fixed several screenshot issues
• Randomly generated humanoid npcs now use the same cosmetic features available to players, randomly
• Simplify SDL gamma calculation and restore default gamma on exit.
• Levelup dialog shows variable parts of talent descriptions (like numbers that go up as you levelup) in green even at talent levels 0 and 5, to better see which values will evolve
• Revision of Fears
• Add a bonus to stealth rating for Armor of Shadows
• Revise shops
• Revise fixed bosses, now they can better levelup and learn new tricks too
• Revise Wyrmics
• Revise Afflicted
• New scriptable map generator along with a variety of combinable algorithms for it
• Revise Stealth
• Revise Shadowblade
• Ban Dreamscape entirely from NPC use
• Modules Markers, IMPORTANT: Removed unpausing the game when using energy in engine.Actor:useEnergy as this was badly misplaced, instead superload useEnergy inside your own player class to do it, look at example's module Player class for how to
• Tilemaps can be scaled, fliped, rotated; new Maze tilemap; Heightmap & Noise tilemaps can be normalized
• Revise Prodigies
• To celebrate nearly 10 years of ToME, a new awesomely drawn custom player tile that comes from the very early days of the game
• Stun: Cooldown lock changed to half, damage reduction changed to 50%
• Confusion: Interaction with confusion immunity removed
• Increase the spawn level of the Melinda event to 30
• Increase resting rate dramatically
• Add 1 regen to Alchemist golem to reduce resting tedium
• Remove Munitions from Archer and re-add Poisons
• Remove useless trees from some classes
• Remove melee retaliation from many NPCs
• Zigur is now always present on the map but forbids entry to any magic user.
• Various visual improvements
• Updated the way NPCs (randbosses) are assigned character classes
• Object requirements can now be any random flag of the wearer
• High Peak levels become smaller towards the end (but keep the same number of foes inside)
• Increased foes density in the Prides
• Escort quests will now spawn in the Infinite Dungeon (between levels 5 and 40)
• Fixed some Infinite Dungeon challenges
• Nerfed patrols a bit
• Revise Ghouls
• Nerf life leech stacking
• Can send talent links in the chat from the talent's right click menu or in the levelup dialog by pressing ctrl+l
• Revise shops system
• More Mummies! Rejoice!
• Revise saves (saves against effects, not savefile!)
• Revise archers
• *NUMEROUS* fixes and updates to a ton of things (can I be more vague? probably but it'll be hard ;) )

A huge thanks to all those contributed to help make this release the biggest release ever!

Completed a run with a possessor the other day. Really interesting class - great for getting to learn the stats of most of the monsters in the game, as you have to pay close attention to damn near everything to play the class properly.

Not a class for players who want to just sort of run through the game. Standard Possessor builds tend to play SLOWLY due to their need to neurotically minimize damage in all encounters.

While I'd say the class feels a little OP when played well, I *DID* still have to run like a crying child away from Atamathon - though now that I've won the game I should probably go back with my named Forge-Giant Demon form with over 10k hp and throw down with him again and see if I can wrap him up properly.

Needless to say, running around wearing a lvl 96 Overpowered Greater Multi-hued Worm and summoning major named bosses as pets during the big fights is hilarious.

Hitting the wrong button during a fight and swapping out of form into your itty-bitty squishy little human form and being instantly one-shotted - not so hilarious. Put that button somewhere far away from everything else on the keyboard. Trust me.

Took my shiny new Sun Paladin for a stroll in the elven ruins, running a fair bit above my level (~21), against lvl 30-33 enemies, but hey, the new version of Sun Pally is pretty tanky and has good effect recovery so I figured it would work out.

Generally unpleasant in there, but things got far worse when the Mummy Lord showed up. My build's main failings are poor accuracy and no detect to speak of, so hitting this guy was a nightmare, and for some reason he was constantly generating ice storms, ice blocks and ice walls.

Luckily I had just enough shielding & healing to slog through this torment for about 10 minutes of grind-and-run fighting until I finally managed to wear him down. Not sure if I ever really hit him, but he gradually killed himself against Martyrdom and damage shields.

The RNG gods were more than kind: He dropped
- Wintertide (T5 Named art - the source of all those ice storms/blocks),
- The Crown of Eternal Night
- Bindings of Eternal Night

So now I'm running around as a wildly OP level 24 Undead Ogre Sun Paladin with an endgame sword of icy doom. I predict a dramatically swift fall to the tower of Dreadfell and a good bit beyond.

Titania The Luminous

PS - Path of the Sun is an amazing class ability.
PPS - Knocked dreadfell and the orc ambush over without breaking a sweat. The only actual threat in the entire dungeon was in a massive vault entirely populated by ~lvl85 enemies. There were one or two deeply unpleasant things in there, but they were dealt with nevertheless.

Hello!

I have been playing this great game on and off for the past ~6 years and finally achieved my first win today! After getting far with an archmage and a summoner, but not being able to push through the late game, I finally found my stride with a Cornac Anorithil of all things.

I had a tough time in the early game and restarted several times after my first death until I figured that my squishiness could be overcomed by pumping con in the early levels. Once I was able to reach around level ~20 my build finally went online and the rest of the game was reaaaaaally enjoyable. I used my category points to pump up my Eclipse and Star Fury and accidentally unlocked the Wild Gift - Harmony tree during a late night session instead of using it on my Circles (I know most people like to go for infusions, but I wanted to try something new; not sure how effective my decision was). For infusions i decided to use a teleport, regeneration, and a shield. I always felt like I had an out in every situation once I got to the mid-game and only died due to carelessness. For my prodigies, I chose Eye of the Tiger and Armor of Shadows. I did use my item vault to grab an Eclipse staff, which I used for the whole game once I had access to the fortress. Having eclipse and Eye of Tiger meant that sometimes I could spam Moonlight Ray at opponents without waiting for the cooldown. I really enjoyed procing Corona with the 4 circles and blasting AOE spells at groups of enemies after opening the danger prompt rooms. It was all really satisfying! Even the higher level anti-magic mobs couldnt survive forever thanks to my trinkets being able to still damage them!

Anyways, I hope you all enjoy the game as much as I have been! And a big thanks to the developer for creating such a satisfying game with such great lore to read!

https://te4.org/characters/23272/tome/ff7325c0-d96d-4801-8de0-1afadfdbcb12

Hello my minions!

Recently I was surprised to find some people wondering if Tales of Maj'Eyal was dead (as in not developed anymore). I was like "WTF??" because I knew it was not, quite the opposite in fact, but then I pondered some more and realized that I'm utterly bad at regularly communicating that fact! So let's try to improve on that with a Grand List Of What Is To Come (Possibly).

As usual I never give dates unless I'm sure. So always take this kind of things with a grain of salt, they may come in two days or two years :)

Release of patch 1.6 with huge changes

1.6 is the next free big (huge) patch for Tales of Maj'Eyal. I have already delayed it far too much as such it has grown into such a monster patch that I likely won't be able to list everything going in without forgetting many others. Still, here are a few of them:

• Deep rework of early game balance, main goal being to reduce startup tediousness. This includes changes to difficulty, scaling, shops, drowning, items, ...
• A ton of cosmetic options for all playable races (including the expansion ones). From many shades of skin colors, to haircuts, beards, tattoos, ...
• Hugely improved NPC AI, smarter, better pathing, and so on. For MOAR GLORIOUS DEATHS!
• Update of Doomed, Cursed, Wyrmics, Antimagic, Shadowblades, Prodigies, Corruptors, Reavers
• Update to many randart powers and ego powers
• A complete revision of runes, inscriptions and charms
• Fixed bosses can now levelup in specific classes to keep the challenge up at higher levels/high difficulties
• Revision of many debuffs
• Melee weapon scaling revision to reign in on late game ultra high damage stupidity and buff early game low damage stupidity
• A ton of misc changes, updates, revisions, ...
• And the usual slew of bugfixes (and NEW bugs :) )

Embers of Rage free update with a new class: Annihilator

So you thought that when an expansion is released it's the end of its life? THINK AGAIN!
After 1.6, Embers of Rage will get an update with a whole new class for you to slaughter poor creatures with: The Annihilator! As its name suggests this is a class for peace-loving orcs!

Annihilators use steamguns and new heavy weapons (flamethrower, shockstaff and boltgun) to destroy their foes all while deploying automated steam turrets and even riding around in a mecharachnid suit!
A force to be reckoned with for sure!

Note to be clear: this is NOT the very next update to Embers of Rage, that one will be released at the same time as patch 1.6 along with an update to all expansions, just to update their systems for 1.6. Annihilators will come a little afterwards.

DarkGod turns evil: Microtransactions, but the good kind!

Don't go screaming bloody murder just yet please ;)
So let's say it upfront: no pay2win to be seen in there!

Now that this is said let's get into more fun details. So if there is no pay2win, what will there be?
Many things! Mostly fun and/or cosmetic stuff as could be expected:

• Additional Online Item's Vault space. Any purchase of the game, expansions, donations, ... already provides vault space, but this is for even MOAR!
• Various cosmetic themed packs. These will include shimmer appearances for most items, plus sometimes/usually additional cosmetic options for playable races. "But DarkGod, I want to have racial cosmetic options without giving you more money!" Well, fear not for 1.6 does bring in a ton of those for free anyway. The more, the merrier!
• Community events! Now for something a little different. In Tales of Maj'Eyal community events are temporary stuff that are sent by the server to any currently playing character. The server randomly sends two of those, called the Bearscape and the Lost Land of Poosh, to players automatically. There are many more, like seasonal ones, or ones only I can push when I feel like it. Now players will be able to acquire the ability to trigger either the Bearscape or Poosh themselves, in addition to the random server pushes that are not changing. But wait there is more! They are still community events, so whenever somebody buys and triggers one, all players currently online will benefit!
• I don't like pay2win. I really really don't. So instead of doing pay2win, I've decided to add a pay2die system instead! If you think your character is too strong, that nothing can kill you as you stride effortlessly through the toughest of foes, just buy this option and get a few level 500 god-level horrors randbosses summoned on you! Death is guaranteed! You can even boast online by showing off what horrible horrible creatures are about to kill you!

As for why I'm adding this now; well this is less fun but I prefer to be honest as for why I'm doing it so...
In last October Steam had a glitch in their algorithm, which effect lasted for months and for many can still be felt today. Basically the algorithm suggesting games had gone bonkers and unless your game was an AAA or super indie it sank to the bottomless depths of hell. Many indie devs, including me, had their revenue cut by like 50+% (sometimes much more).
Valve told us this was not intentional and I truly believe them; they've always been very nice people when I needed them so I have no reason to doubt their word. But still, it made me realize that I am so dependent on Steam. This kind of made me enter panic mode, I was mentally unwell for some time I must admit. Maybe I'm too fearful, a scared little boy or whatever but still that's how I feel/felt.
So I've pondered about additional revenue streams and I remembered about some players that kept asking to be able to buy more vault space and cosmetics. So finally after many years I caved in and the rest is (future) history!

And to be perfectly clear: this is just a way for people who want to support the game to do so while getting a few cosmetic/fun stuff out of it. The game itself is free/cheap and will keep on being so because making my game accessible to more people is something I truly believe in. Also I'm an evil god of darkness, thus I want to reach as many minions as possible; you know to eat their souls and stuff... :)

Next expansion announcement: The Lost Land

And last but certainly not least... A new expansion! And not a small one at that. For a long time now I've only announced expansions when they were very nearly finished. This time I'm trying another way and instead I'm teasing it early on. As you can see on the teaser, no ingame art exists yet but many sketches. The lore, zones, foes, stories, ... are all roughly defined and being implemented. The new races and classes are already half-way done.
Still it'll be a long way until release, which will obviously happen in exactly 1DGTU!

"But DarkGod, you didn't tell us what it is ABOUT!" Fear not my brave minion, I'm coming to that!
I can not yet reveal too much about it, and keep in mind anything can change, but here are some key facts for your pleasure:

• It is set on the continent of Tar'Eyal, to the south of Maj'Eyal, which you can already glimpse at the shores on the southern point of Shaloren lands ingame.
• Two prominent forces on the continent: the Great and Bountiful Undeath Empire and the Saupur Imperium
• The continent has been shielded from the outside by a mysterious shield for millennia
• It features a "half-campaign". It happens at the same time as Age of Ascendancy, the player starts on Tar'Eyal and it replaces the first half of the normal game.
• About 15ish zones planned, perhaps more
• At least two new classes: Dust Mages and Gravelords. It is very likely at least a third one will be added.
• At least six new races: Risens, Vessels, Vampires, Exarchs, Saurpurs (two kinds, reptilian and draconic). And possibly more!
• The usual tons of new lore, artifacts, npcs, achievements, quests, ...

To be on trend

So it seems like every single content creator is on Patreon but me. Well, I suppose I need to fix that then!
Joking aside, I've been asked many times if I could provide alternatives to Paypal for donations because well, some (many?) people are not fond of it at all. Lately Patreon announced they'd change their fees, except for people that got on before May, so I thought "Hey, I suppose it's as good as time as ever".
Now this is a bit of a different Patreon page than people are used to. In the spirit of always trying to keep things fair for every players, no matter where they buy the game/donate, I've decided that all the different pledge tiers would never entail players to anything special. Instead the system will simply count all the money that has been received from a pledge and add it to the voratun coins on te4.org. Just like any other donations. Patreon pledgers will get a blue name in the chat like any other recurring donation setups.
I know this is likely to lose me some pledges, but I think being fair to everybody is more important.
You can find the Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/darkgodone

The Future: new rendering engine

For a very long time now I've had a side project: upgrading the display code used by T-Engine4.
When I started making the game it was my very first OpenGL project, so as you can imagine the code sucked royally.
It has gotten better over time but it still follows the same principles I first implemented, and frankly, they suck.

Some time ago I spoke about porting the game to tablets & phones, this presents a lot of UI challenges as Tales of Maj'Eyal is just a wee bit more complex than your usual phone game. But it also presents code problems as the current way of doing OpenGL just does not cut it.

The new rendering code is meant to alleviate this problem. It's a very long project because it means rewriting so much code and because the new code is not the same even in concept. The worst part about this project is that, on the surface, the user will see very little change from all of this. Apart from a somewhat better font handling and some smoother animations, the primary changes will be a new particle system, and a visual editor to implement them.

Still it's a lot of thankless invisible work, but it is needed to ensure the future of the game :)

The Other Future: translation?

This is even more hypothetical but something I've also worked on a bit, adding a translation layer to the engine to make it available in multiple languages. This is a huge undertaking and unlikely to come fast, if at all, but it would be so nice, wouldn't it?

Final Words: the DarkGod has spoken!

And there you go, you know of some of the projects being worked on/thought about. Do note that those are only the relative short-term stuff, ideas are certainly not something I lack ;) As I have said many times, Tales of Maj'Eyal is my baby, I love it and I do not plan on stopping as long as the community supports me with love (and sadly, money too as this is the real world :/ ).

Thanks to all of you and I hope you'll love what comes next, and then what comes afterwards and ... and ... well you get the idea :)

What could be terrifying about little cute bunnies and eggs?
Nothing you say? Well, think again for the Pikataclysm has arrived to Eyal and will stay active until May 1st!
Beware of what lurks in this strange place, for sometimes, bunnies have big teeth.

The Pikataclysm is a yearly special server event, triggered every 10 minutes by the server to all players currently logged in. There are others such events, come find them all during the year!

Thanks to some luck, I was able to get the DLC for this game. Unfortunately, I can't actually start a new game. Major bummer. If anyone could help me get started with the DLC, I'd be most grateful.

Just a small reminder to read the logs when fighting foes that won't die. Took me a while to realise that I healed the radiant horror when attacking him with my fire-gauntlets :D

First time writing on here, only just discovered this option.

I've been playing ToME on and off for about 6 years now and Exploration Mode is the only thing that keeps it fun for me. I don't really care too much about the roguelike experience, and while trying my best not to die, its not fun for me to repeatedly bang my head against a wall in order to make it budge. I'm a super casual player and it is immensely fun for me that this game got past roguelike elitism and offers something for all kinds of players.

There is so much variety in builds and what you can do and while the tactical angle is great, what kills most roguelikes for me is that you need a razor sharp attention span over hours and hours of play. There just are lapses of concentration for me, this game is hard enough to kill you at any point where you stop paying close attention, so my ADD brain is very thankful that this kind of misstep doesn't spell the end for my run anymore. I play this game similar to any normal RPG and after finishing my first run, I'm already itching to try it with a new character (or maybe do some postgame stuff first).

So yeah, my character was Rall, the Dwarf Berserker, first winner on this account. I know she wouldn't have made it in Adventure Mode (let alone roguelike), but I'm still very happy I managed to pull through with her. What killed me most of the time was just curiosity and some very brutal situations (I learned that having high resistances doesn't mean you can't take over 1000 damage in one turn). Aside from these lapses, I am very proud I managed to kill the 7 Multicolor Wyrms without a death on this character, which I attribute mostly to how you can kite them out of the room 1 by 1 (most of the time).

My goals are now to unlock all the classes and races and get a few more wins in with more advanced/weird/fun classes.

Cheers!

This is the first in what I hope are many posts from me, to this amazing game and community. I have only been playing for a week or two, and this the first character who died that I feel regret for. Even if, from what I have gleaned, I was not even a fourth into the campaign, this is still pretty cool so far

Today Ilegon, Cornac Shadowblade, falls on some god-forsaken blighted ruins on the middle of nowhere. I guess the game saying something along the lines of "you heard horrible, scary things and feel terrified just standing on the entrance" should've tipped me off. In my defense, that character had already survived things he had no business ever living through by sheer grit, obstinacy, dirty tricks, and luck (I guess halfling foot do bring luck, eh). If I had been on some of those fights on the other side, I would've been like "Die already you cheating bastard!" But alas, his luck had to run out someday. https://te4.org/characters/246697/tome/642a66d3-1385-476d-8ade-e7b62a3527a9

I'll miss that guy. It was only these last few days that I was marveled with the synergy the Stealth and Ambush trees had. Before that it was mostly Stealth tree and Shadowstep. There is really nothing quite like using a shadow clone, charging into the fray worryless and combining shadow dance with a shadow veil. That was cathartic. Or, if it was an ass with 100 dark resist, just debuffing and petrifying him to soft him up.

But man, he seriously had quite some luck.

Now, after talking a bit on the chat this morning (and realizing that I'm, in fact, very far away from unlocking Necromancer) I have started a Higher Summoner to satisfy my craving for unleashing a horde of monsters on my enemies. So far, it kind of feels like I'm playing roguelike Pokemon. A very cool roguelike pokemon. I died already at level six, but since that was just me being stupid against the Assassin Lord on the ambush I started it anew.

It's a bit strange suddenly being "the leader" instead of "the lone knife that stabs things on the back". Kind of refreshing. A mind beam of sort I've acquired has helped me feel less useless towards my summons, though it doesn't help that I'm killing them too sometimes. Poor turtle, holding the line only so I can blast my foes together with him. He deserves a raise or something. It's probably because I'm such a terrible boss that my Treant likes to freeze me. But don't worry, I'll get better.

Gotta catch em all!