EMBERHOLD

• **The holds have doors now.** Every building in Emberhold and Frosthold has a proper pair of doors on its entrance — shut, they meet in the middle; press [E] and they swing apart. And the slits in their walls, which were open holes, are glazed windows.
• If you're carrying on in an existing world, the doors appear by themselves next time you host. The glazing needs the `/cityrepair` console command run once — the city's walls were built and saved before glass existed, so they have to be rewritten.

• **Tools and weapons wear out.** Crafted gear now has durability: a pickaxe spends a use per block, a weapon per swing or shot, the hoe per plot and the rod per cast. A bar appears along the bottom of the slot once a tool has been used — green to red — and the bags show the exact figure. You get a warning when one is nearly gone, and it snaps in your hands when it runs out. Wood lasts 80 uses, stone 200, iron 500. Anything you already own starts out as good as new. The rare blades — Cindersteel, Thornfang, Rimeblade, Wraithfrost — never wear out at all: wearing through crafted gear is the road to something that doesn't.
• **Doors, windows and glass.** Fire sand into **Glass** over a campfire, frame it into a **Window**, and hang a **Door** or a **Glazed Door** in a two-block doorway. [E] swings a door — and unlike everything else you can place, a door actually stops you, so a shut door keeps mobs out of your hut too.
• **Bags.** Three of them — **Hide Satchel**, **Traveller's Pack**, **Deepcore Haversack** — and using one permanently opens more backpack slots. The three together take your pack from 27 slots to 54. The first two are craftable (Tobin and Brann sell them); the Haversack has no recipe at all — Brann keeps one on the shelf, and the deep boss drops it. Locked slots are shown greyed so you can see what you're working towards.
• **Furniture stays where you turned it.** Anything you'd rotated — tables, chairs, chests — was quietly springing back to face north after a restart. It now remembers which way you put it.

• **Smoother in the dark.** Underground and at night the sun was still quietly rendering shadows it was far too dim to cast — wasted work every frame as you moved. It now switches those off once the sun can't throw a visible shadow, easing the stutter while running and mining below ground. (More streaming smoothness to come.)
• **F3 debug screen.** Press F3 for a live readout — framerate, frame time, and what the world streamer is doing — handy for spotting exactly where a hitch comes from.

• **Talent points work again.** The `+` next to a talent in the character sheet was doing nothing since the appearance update — the sheet was quietly rebuilding itself every frame and swallowing the click. Spending talent points is fixed.

• **City mailboxes.** Every hold now has a mailbox on the plaza, by the quest board. [E] opens it: type a player's name, click a stack, and it's posted — even if they're offline. Deliveries arrive when they next log in (or straight away if they're in the world), and anything that doesn't fit in their bags waits at the post. Unknown or ambiguous names are refused, so a typo can never lose your items.

• **Give items to a friend.** Look at a nearby player and press [G] to hand over the stack you're holding. If their bags are nearly full they take what fits and you keep the rest — nothing is ever lost in the handover.

• **Private chests.** Craft a chest at a bench (6 planks, 2 iron ore), place it anywhere you can build, and it's yours alone — 15 slots that only you can open, and only you can break. [E] opens it; click a stack to move it between the chest and your bags. Your stash survives restarts, and smashing your own chest spills everything back out.

• **Deep water never freezes now.** Tundra ice only forms where the water is a single block deep — a pond up north is an ice margin around an open middle, and frozen lakes are no longer free walkways over water you'd drown in. The world map reflects the smaller ice.
• **Water has a current.** Flowing water — a channel you dig, a bucket you tip — now carries dropped items downstream (they pool at the end of the channel) and drifts anything swimming in it. Still ponds and lakes are still; your farm channels won't shove you around.
• **Frosthold faces.** Sigrun, Iseld, and Halla each have their own look now instead of borrowing Rowan's, Hale's, and Marra's.

• **Deep water no longer holds you up.** Walking onto water from a bank used to leave you strolling across the surface like it was pavement — the water's surface was quietly part of the ground collision. Now the only things that hold your weight out there are ice and bridges; step onto open water and you'll be swimming.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **No building left empty.** Every hut in both holds now has furniture, light, and someone (or something) in it. Frosthold's Wayfinder's Hall became Sigrun's study — desk, stools, and shelves of maps; The Frostrest is finally an inn, with kegs, a larder, and torchlit rooms across the hold.
• **Meet Halla the Hearthkeeper.** The Frostrest has an innkeeper now. She'll sell you bread, cooked chicken, and frostbite stew hot off the pot — and tell you a thing or two about the hold.
• **The Wayfarer's Rest got the same treatment** — kegs behind Marra and a second table in the corner, so Emberhold's inn reads like one too.
• Fixed a stool in Emberhold's Trainers' Hall that never actually appeared — it was trying to stand in the same spot as a torch.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **The mirror shows your whole head now.** The portrait was cropping at the hairline, which rather defeated the point of checking your hair. The glass now frames you head to boots, mohawk included.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Mirrors.** A standing mirror now leans against the back wall of The Wayfarer's Rest in Emberhold and Brann's Outfitters in Frosthold. Step up to one and it shows you yourself — skin, hair, outfit, and whatever armor you're wearing. Press [E] on it to open your character sheet and restyle while you watch.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Look like yourself.** The main menu now has appearance pickers next to your name: seven skin tones, eight hair colours, four hair styles (traveller, bald, ponytail, mohawk), and eight outfits — from Forester green to Emberguard rust to Coalworn black. Everyone in the world sees your choices, worn armor layers over the top, and you can restyle any time from the character sheet [C].
• The old automatic colour-wash (which tinted your whole body a random colour from your name) is gone — your outfit is your colour now.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **The map arrow tells the truth now.** Your arrow on the map and minimap was mirrored east/west — head south-west and it swore you were going south-east. North and south were honest; everything else was a lie. Fixed: the arrow points exactly where you're facing, all eight ways.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Frosthold looks like Frosthold.** Brann the Outfitter is no longer Tobin's twin working a second job in the snow — he's his own man now, a hooded traveller dressed for the cold. And the hold's notice board is a proper spruce-and-parchment affair with snow settled along the top beam, not a copy of Emberhold's.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Combat you can read.** Melee swings sweep a visible arc — yours and everyone else's, so a fight looks like a fight from across the field. Hits spark where they land. And the abilities got real teeth: Ember Nova hurls embers outward with its blast, Slam kicks dust across the ground, bolts and lances burst where they strike, and heals rise in a drift of sparkles.
• **Frost finally looks like frost.** The Rimecaller's Frost Lance fires an ice-blue lance now, instead of the borrowed ember-orange Cinder Bolt beam it's been hiding behind since the class arrived.
• **Deaths have a moment.** Creatures no longer blink out of the world the instant they fall — they play out their death, crumple, and puff away.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Armor.** Four worn slots — head, chest, legs, boots. Open your bags (**I**) and the new **Worn** column sits on the left: click a piece in your bags, then a worn slot, to put it on; click a worn slot on its own to take it off. Every piece shaves a cut off every hit you take — the column and the character sheet (**P**) both show your total.
• **Three tiers to chase.** Mossbacks and rimewolves now shed **hide**, and three pelts at a bench make your first cap — a full hide set turns a tenth of every blow. Iron pieces cost ore and a hide apiece and double that. And every boss on the frontier now guards a signature piece of its own: Ashmaw's **Cindersteel Helm**, Deepmaw's **Deepcore Greaves**, Hoarfrost's **Rimeguard Boots**, and Kaldr's **Wraithfrost Cuirass** — collect all four and nearly a third of every hit glances off.
• **Everyone can see it.** Your kit shows on your body — other players see the helm, cuirass, greaves and boots you're actually wearing, and so do you in third person (**F5**). Armor stays on through death, too — your bags spill into the corpse, your armor doesn't.
• **The outfitters now outfit.** Tobin in Emberhold sells starter hide pieces; Brann in Frosthold — the Outfitter, at last — stocks the full hide set plus the iron helm and sabatons.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Emberhold has sound.** Footsteps that know what you're walking on — grass, stone, snow, planks, sand, and a splash through the shallows. Picks biting into rock, blocks breaking and going down, soil turning under the hoe, crops coming up. Blades, fists, impacts, and creatures that make a noise when you hit them and a worse one when they go down. You can hear other players working nearby, too.
• **Music that knows where you are.** Separate beds for the temperate heartland, the tundra, the desert, inside the walls of a hold, and the frontier after dark. It plays a track, then leaves you alone for a while — the quiet between is the point.
• **Weather and firesides you can hear.** Wind across open ground, heavier out on the snow; rain when it's raining on you; water lapping near the lakes; campfires crackling. Get under a roof — even one you built — and the weather quiets down.
• **Volume controls.** Master, music, and sound effects sliders in the Options window (**Esc**), alongside render distance. Saved per machine, and they apply as you drag.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Mounts.** The road between the holds just got a lot shorter. Talk to **Rowan** in Emberhold once you've ten levels behind you and fifty gold in your purse, and she'll teach you to ride. After that, **Tobin** keeps an **Ashland Strider** — a courser bred on the ash flats — and **Brann** up in Frosthold sells the **Rimehorn**, a great tundra stag that walks over snow you'd flounder in. Blow the whistle to learn the beast; press **H** to call it, and **H** or **E** to step down.
• **A mount is yours forever.** The whistle teaches you the animal rather than handing you one, so there's nothing to lose, leave behind, or have taken off you. Your stable lives on the character sheet — pick which one **H** calls.
• **Something rides out of the deep winter.** Kaldr the Deepwinter very rarely gives up a **Wraithfrost Steed**: a pale wolf that runs faster than anything for sale and glows faintly in the dark. People will notice.
• **Riding is for travelling.** You can't swing, mine or build from the saddle, and a solid hit throws you off — so mounts get you *to* the fight, not through it. Holds stay on foot, and deep water still belongs to boats.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Fishing.** A new skill, next to Mining and Cooking. Craft a **Fishing Rod** at the bench (three sticks and a plank — everyone knows how), cast at any water and wait for the bite. Ponds, lakes, rivers, a hole smashed in tundra ice, or over the side of your boat — all fair game. The more you fish, the better the catch: minnows for the beginner, silver perch as you learn, golden trout for the master. Getting hit scares the fish off.
• **Fish cookery.** Every catch cooks into something at the campfire, if your Cooking is up to it: a roast minnow for beginners, a proper seared perch, and the **Golden Trout Supper** — a master dish that sharpens your blade for a full hour and wants a farmed wheat, so the farm, the rod and the fire all feed one plate.
• **Waystones look the part now.** The fast-travel stones are tall rune-lit obelisks humming with old road-magic — no more borrowed notice board.
• **Crops now care where they're planted.** Wheat grows anywhere, but emberpepper wants the hot desert sand (bring water — it never rains there), indigoleaf the green temperate soil, and frostcap its home snow. Plant one in the wrong climate and it politely refuses — seed kept, reason given — instead of quietly never growing.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **You can swim.** Water holds you up now: you float, hold **jump** to swim, and climbing out of a lake just works — press up against the bank and hop ashore. Watch the blue breath bar when you dive: thirty seconds of air, refilled quickly at the surface, and staying under past it hurts until it kills. The deep is not your friend after dark.
• **Boats.** Craft a **Rowboat** at the bench from five planks and a stick — everyone knows how. Right-click at water to set it down, **E** to hop in, row with the usual movement keys, **E** to step out. It's faster than swimming, your feet stay dry, and it waits where you left it — punch it a few times to pack it back into your bag.
• Animals paddle now too — they bob at the surface instead of sinking, so your penned herd can never quietly drown.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Rivers and lakes.** The world has real water now, not just ponds. Rivers wind across the land between lakes big and small — Emberhold itself turns out to sit on a lakeshore, with bridges carrying the roads over the water. Shores are sandy beaches, the tundra's lakes and rivers are frozen sheets of ice you can cross (and break through), and the desert stays bone dry — its low ground forms sunken basins where water never reaches. Farms beside a river or lake count as watered without rain; the desert is still the one place you have to carry your water in a bucket.
• **⚠ Start a new world for this one.** The land itself has changed shape to make room for the water. Old worlds will still load, but anywhere you've built or dug will sit oddly against the new terrain.
• **The city turrets are lit inside.** Climbing a corner tower is no longer a fumble up a black stone tube: window slits let the daylight in, and torches burn on the stair landings all the way up — in Frosthold too.
• **Fires give off smoke.** Campfires send up a proper column of grey smoke you can spot from a distance; torches give a faint wisp. It thins and drifts as it rises, and settles down with the night.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Animals you can farm.** Puffles — and a new grazer, the **mossback** — can now be herded and bred. Hold **wheat** and any nearby ones will trail after you, so you can lead them into a fenced pen (four of last month's wooden fences make a square run). Get two of the same animal penned, feed them each a wheat with **E**, and they'll have a young one — smaller, and it grows up over a few minutes. A penned herd stays put and survives a restart, so it's a source of meat you build once and keep. Wild animals still wander off and vanish; a penned, fed one is yours.
• **No two ponds are alike.** Ponds used to be identical circles — once you'd seen one you'd seen them all. Now they come in every size and depth with lumpy, irregular outlines: a wide shallow scrape here, a small deep tarn there, kidneys and teardrops instead of dinner plates.
• **The tundra's ponds freeze over.** A pond in the snow is now capped with **ice** rather than sitting there as open blue water. You can walk across it — and break through to reach the water underneath, to fill a bucket or just get at what's below. Frozen ponds read as pale ice on your map, too.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **There is water in the world now.** Ponds sit in the flat ground across the temperate lands and the tundra — there's one about a minute's walk from Emberhold's gates, and another near Frosthold. They show up on your map (M), so you can go and find one. Wade in: the bottom is sand, and it's shallow enough to walk back out of.
• **It flows.** Break a block beside water and the water comes in, spreading and thinning out as it goes and settling where it stops. Dig a channel out of a pond and it'll run down it; drop a block in and you've dammed it. Ponds never run dry, so you can't ruin one by digging.
• **Buckets.** Craft one from iron at the bench, or buy one from Tobin or Brann. Right-click still water to fill it, right-click again to tip it out wherever you want it. What you pour is permanent — it stays where you put it.
• **The desert can be farmed.** Last release promised the desert "would need irrigating one day". This is that day. Crops now grow if there's water within four blocks, level with the soil — no rain required. That means a desert farm, or a plot under a roof, or a field that keeps growing through a dry spell and through the night. It's real work: the desert has no water of its own, so you carry it there. That's the point.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Farming.** Craft a **hoe**, till a patch of dirt or grass, and plant a field. Four crops to grow: **wheat**, **emberpepper**, **indigoleaf**, and the tundra's **frostcap** — until now you could only forage that one wild. Press **E** on a ripe crop to bring it in, and you get more seeds back than you sowed, so a first handful becomes a proper farm. Seeds turn up in dug grass, and Tobin and Brann both stock them along with the hoe.
• **Your crops need rain.** Remember the weather being "purely atmospheric for now"? No longer. Crops only grow while it's actually raining on them — a dry spell just pauses them, so nothing is ever lost, and they'll pick up again when the clouds come back. Snow counts, so the tundra can farm its own frostcap. Build a roof over a plot and you'll shelter it from the very rain it's waiting for. The desert never rains at all — it'll need irrigating one day.
• **Dyes and coloured blocks.** Crush what you grow into six dyes — **ember, tide, verdant, straw, frost, soot** — and colour your stone and planks with them. Twelve new blocks to build with, on a new **Dyes** tab at the bench. Two of the dyes come from leaves and ash, so you can start colouring things before you've ever held a hoe.
• **Three dishes off your own field.** **Bread** for anyone who's grown a little wheat, a **Pepper Skewer** that gives you a damage buff you can grow rather than pray for off a boss, and a **Harvest Pie** for a mixed plot. Bringing in a harvest builds your Cooking skill, so a farmer levels into the dishes their own crops go into.
• **Fences are made of wood again.** They looked like metal barriers despite being built from planks and sticks. They're proper timber now — and they **join up on their own**: put them in a line or a square and they link into a fence, no fiddling with which way round they go.
• **Your friends can see your furniture.** Every table, chair, barrel, lantern and sign you placed was invisible to anyone who joined your game — only the host ever saw them. Fixed, so a decorated hall or a signposted road finally looks the same to everyone.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **There's a map now — press M.** The whole frontier, drawn properly: the holds, the roads between them, the tundra, the Burned Hold. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. You'll find your vendors, trainers, notice boards and waystones marked on it — but only for holds you've actually found, so the map fills in as you get out there. Quests you've taken are pinned, and your party shows up live so you can see where everyone's wandered off to.
• **A minimap sits by your hotbar**, so you can see where you're going without opening anything. It steps aside whenever you open a screen.
• **Snow drifts against the walls.** It used to just go white on Frosthold's wall while it snowed — now it banks up against the stone like real snow, piling deepest in the corners, building through the storm and melting off after. It gathers inside the walls too, though the hold keeps its plaza swept.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Caves are properly dark now.** Underground, you could tell what time it was on the surface — the walls warmed and dimmed as the sun set above you. Deep ground now reads as its own dark at any hour, lit by your torches and campfires and nothing else. Cave mouths still catch their shaft of daylight.
• **Snow lost its hard edges.** Out on the tundra, every step in the ground showed up as a harsh dark triangle against the white. Snow now scatters the light the way real snow does, so slopes read as soft ground instead of sharp facets — and it still goes properly dark at night.
• **Smoother dawns and dusks.** With the sun low, the game was drawing far more than it needed to; sunrise and sunset are now considerably cheaper to render.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Weather!** The sky now has moods. Clouds roll in and grey the sky over, then it rains in the temperate lands and **snows up in the tundra** (the desert stays dry, and nothing falls on you underground). It's driven by the server so everyone shares the same sky, and drifts between clear, overcast, and stormy on its own.
• **Snow gathers on Frosthold's walls.** While it's snowing, wind-driven snow builds up on the outer face of the hold's wall and melts away again once the storm passes.
• **Weather is purely atmospheric for now** — no effect on crops, mobs, or movement yet. Those hooks come later.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Mining now tells you what you got.** Breaking a block pops a floating "+1 Stone" (or "+2" on a lucky double-drop) right where you mined — no more digging blind and checking your bags.
• **A tidier wall of quest-givers.** The gate guards all offer the same "fletch some arrows" job, so instead of a whole row of identical **!** marks around the wall, only the nearest guard shows it now.
• **Quit from the pause menu.** Press **Esc** and there's now a **Quit to Desktop** button under the render-distance slider — it saves and exits cleanly, same as closing the window.
• **Trainers' Hall tidy-up.** One bookshelf was facing its back to the room; it now faces the right way. And Serra no longer stands inside Rowan — a resident who'd drifted off her spot is nudged back into place. Both fixes clean up existing worlds automatically next time you load in.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Much smoother play.** Hunted down the jerky/stuttering feel some machines had while walking around. The worst offender was the wildlife/monster spawner doing all its work in one big burst every couple of seconds — that's now spread out so it never drops a frame. Also moved the every-30-seconds autosave off the main thread (no more brief freeze when it saves), and stopped the sky from needlessly rebuilding its lighting every single frame.
• **Render distance is now adjustable.** Press **Esc** for an Options menu with a **render distance** slider — drag it and the world updates instantly, and your choice is remembered per machine. The default is a bit closer than before, which alone makes things noticeably smoother; slide it back up if your machine can spare it, or down for buttery-smooth on lighter hardware.
• **Quest markers stay in their own town.** The `!` / `?` over a quest giver no longer shows through the world all the way to the *other* city — you only see markers for the hold you're actually standing in.
• **Fixed a townsperson stuck floating in the sky** over Emberhold. Old saves heal themselves on next load.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **A storyline for Frosthold: The Long Winter.** Warden Iseld, the tundra hold's watch-captain, gives a five-quest chain — thin the frenzied rimewolves, survey the deep white to the north, gather the frost-blighted frostcaps and bring them to Sigrun (who reads what's really out there), warm yourself against the deep cold, then hunt down **Kaldr the Deepwinter**, the frost-revenant driving the pack. Kaldr always drops the **Wraithfrost Blade** — the strongest melee weapon on the frontier.
• **Frostcaps: a tundra plant to gather.** Wild frost mushrooms grow in patches out on the snows between Frosthold and its camp. Walk up and press **E** to pick one; the patch **regrows** over time, so it's a renewable supply, not a one-time find. They cook into **Rime Broth**, a warming heal.
• **Waystone fixes.** The waystone no longer offers to travel you to the hold you're already standing in, and **you can always travel home to Emberhold** — even if your character never "officially" discovered its own start city.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Every item is a real 3D object in your hand now** — no more flat picture cards. Food (drumsticks, stews, the feast platter), materials (shards, sap, a proper arrow), and recipe scrolls all show as little 3D models, matching the tools and weapons that already did.
• **Inventory icons are rendered straight from those 3D models**, so what you see in the slot is exactly what you hold — no more mismatches (the Cindersteel Blade's icon finally matches its blade, and the pickaxe and bow icons are crisp 3D renders instead of hand-drawn guesses).

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **Roads.** Cleared, stone-paved roads now run between Emberhold and Frosthold and out to the boss camps, so you're not bushwhacking blind across the frontier. They keep trees off themselves and **can't be dug up or built over** — the paths stay put.
• **Fast travel.** A **waystone** stands in each city plaza. Lay a hand on it and it warps you to any hold you've already walked to — so once you've made the trek to Frosthold, you can hop between the two cities in an instant. (You have to discover a hold on foot first.)

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **A third class: the Rimecaller.** A frost caller who binds the cold to their hand. Its signature **Frost Lance** strikes from range and leaves what it hits *crawling* — chilled slow enough to kite. Rounded out with **Ice Burst** (a frost blast all around you), **Frost Ward** (a shield), and **Frostmend** (a heal), plus two talent trees — Rime and Glacier.
• **Switch your class at Frosthold.** Sigrun the Wayfinder keeps the hall on Frosthold's east side. For 20 gold she'll set you on any path — Warden, Ashcaller, or the new Rimecaller — and your talents start fresh. Reaching the second city is what unlocks the switch; new characters still choose their first path with Rowan in Emberhold.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• **There is a second city.** Far to the north-west, out across the snows, stands **Frosthold** — a walled, guarded tundra hold with its own outfitter (Brann) and a notice board of local work. It's a long walk from Emberhold, and the frontier gets more dangerous the further you range.
• The **tundra bites harder**: the deep snow country runs at a higher danger tier, so tougher things roam it — including **Rimewolves**, ice-pale wolves that hunt Frosthold's walls after dark.
• A new **boss camp** north of Frosthold: **Hoarfrost the Gaunt** holds it with a pack of rimewolves, and always drops the **Rimeblade** — a frost sword to rival the Cindersteel. Take the "Gaunt Thing North" posting.
• Frosthold's board carries three postings to start you off (cull the rimewolves, gather everfrost sap, hunt Hoarfrost). More to come — a trainer, its own class, and a storyline are on the way.
• Emberhold is untouched — your city, your buildings, and your saves are exactly as you left them.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• The caves are alive now. Dig below the surface and you'll meet mobs that only live in the dark: fast, fragile Gloomfangs that swarm, and slow, stony Rockjaws that hit hard. Surface monsters stay on the surface — the deep is its own place.
• Deep in the dark something bigger stirs. Take the "The Thing in the Deep" posting from the quest board, go underground, and Deepmaw will find you — its glowing Deepcore is a slayer's prize.
• New quest board postings for the deep: mine iron from the deep rock, cull the Gloomfang warrens, and hunt Deepmaw. Mining quests now count the ore you actually dig, so you can't just buy your way through them.
• Cooking is a skill worth levelling. Recipes now carry a Cooking level: Roast Haunch opens up at level 3, and the capstone Emberfeast — a strong hour-long damage boost — needs its scroll *and* Cooking level 8. Keep cooking at a campfire to level up; the crafting panel shows what you need.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Active buffs now show as icons above the toolbar — a chip for each dish buff (damage, speed) with its strength and the time remaining, fading away when it runs out.
• Toolbar tidy-up: the window buttons are all the same width now, ability icons sit centred in their slots, and each ability's key letter is a bolder, outlined badge in the corner so it reads over the art.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Levelling up now raises your maximum health a little each time — you grow tougher as you grow stronger.
• Bosses wear a name tag so you know what you're squaring up to.
• Selling reworked: raw stone, logs and coal sell by the lot rather than a gold-a-piece, so bulk digging isn't a money printer. You now sell a whole stack at once, with the total shown and a click to confirm.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Eating is now a short action: hold still for a moment while a bar fills, and taking a hit interrupts it — no more snacking your way through a fight.
• Finishing a quest now says so, with a "Quest complete" banner and the rewards in your log.
• Ore and coal turn up more often while you dig.
• Torches no longer cast a harsh black shadow — narrow mining tunnels read clearly now.
• Ability descriptions on the character sheet show their real values with your talents counted in (Bulwark with Stalwart reads its true duration).
• The interface scales up on larger, higher-resolution screens instead of shrinking into the corner.
• The character sheet no longer overlaps the toolbar.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Fixed guards multiplying at the gates: a server restart while a guard was out patrolling used to leave a stray on the road and hire a replacement. Existing worlds tidy their watch automatically.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Patrolling guards no longer jam in the gateway when they meet — they pass each other cleanly, each keeping to their own side of the gate, and always return to post.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Two guards now flank every gate — and they patrol: out through the gate, a short walk down the road, and back to post, each on their own rhythm.
• Turret stairs continue past the walkway to the very top — stand on the parapet between the merlons.
• Serra is no longer trapped inside a table, and the Trainers' Hall shelves sit between the windows instead of blocking one. Older worlds tidy themselves up automatically.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Emberhold looks like a fortress now: thicker, taller walls you can actually walk along, battlements on the outer edge, arched gates, and corner turrets with stairs inside — climb up and patrol the whole circuit. (Older worlds: the host runs /cityrepair once to upgrade.)
• Furniture! Craft tables, chairs, stools, barrels, crates, bookshelves, potted plants, fences, and glowing lanterns under the new Home tab — or buy starters from Tobin. Lanterns keep monsters away like torches.
• The city's buildings are furnished and lived-in, with plants at the doors and warm light inside.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Buff dishes can be eaten at full health — you no longer have to get hurt before an Ember-Glazed Chicken will go down.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Cooking got deep: learn recipes from scrolls — buy *Hearty Stew* from Tobin, or hunt the camp bosses for *Ember-Glazed Chicken* (+25% damage for an hour, made with ember shards!) and *Frostbite Stew* (+20% speed). Buffs show under the hint bar and survive logging out.
• The crafting panel grew up: category tabs, a search box, a "craftable only" filter, and a proper detail view showing exactly what you have and what you're missing — plus Craft ×5 for batches.
• Chat frees your mouse so the Say/Party button is actually clickable, and the pickaxe finally hits things with its point.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• The compass and your coordinates now live together on the toolbar, left of the hotbar — no more glancing at screen corners.
• Chat has a Say/Party button beside the box, and it remembers which channel you were using.
• Typing in chat no longer moves your character — space bars belong in sentences, not jumps.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Tools are real objects in your hands now: proper low-poly swords, pickaxes, the bow, and the Thornfang Club replace the flat icons.
• Tools swing like they mean it: pickaxes chop overhead, swords arc, and the bow visibly draws an arrow before it flies.
• You can finally see what other players are holding — held items never actually showed on other characters before.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• The last coloured capsules are people now: Tobin the Provisioner wears his farmer's hat, Marra the Wayfarer greets you at the Rest, and Serra the Trainer stands ready in her monk's garb.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Your held item is readable again: it sits above the hotbar plate now instead of hiding behind it, so switching weapons visibly changes what you're holding.
• In third person your character actually carries the held item and swings it.
• New buttons beside the ability bar open every window by mouse — inventory, quests, character, party, log, and the camera toggle — no more memorising keys (they still work, and the buttons remind you).
• The inventory panel now labels the hotbar row and the backpack, and a new "Destroy selected" button (with a confirm) finally lets you bin unwanted items.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Press F5 to see your own character: a third-person camera that never clips through terrain. F5 again to go back.
• Signs! Craft one from planks and a stick, place it on the ground or a wall, then press E on it to write. The city's buildings now hang name boards over their doors too.
• Press K for the new Log window: chat, joins, your hits and the damage you take, XP, and loot — and when someone dies, everyone hears what got them.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• The Burned Hold is a real ruin now: charred broken walls, an ash field seamed with coal, and a collapsed tower around Ashmaw's lair. On a world from an older version, the host can run `/ruinrepair` there to redraw it.
• Boss camps are out in the wild: Bramble Hollow south-east of the city, Cinder Gulch deep in the far desert, and Frostbark Grove in the western snows. Each crawls with respawning mobs around a named boss — much harder, and it always drops something worth the trip.
• Picking things up now shows a little "+2 Ember Shard" toast.
• Your level shows on the bar from the moment you join, not only after your first fight.
• Left-click with food in hand eats it instead of smashing the block in front of you.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Gate guards are proper armoured soldiers now, not coloured capsules.
• Fixed a bug where a city resident who had fallen through the world in an older save (Serra, in some worlds) never came back — they're now restored to their post automatically.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• The title screen has a proper look now: the walled city under an ember-lit dusk sky, sparks rising.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• New faces: emberlings are proper fiery imps, Ashmaw is a real dragon, and Captain Hale, Rowan, and the quest board have models instead of coloured capsules.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• The interface grew up: one dark ember style across every window, a proper dock plate under the hotbar, ability icons with a draining cooldown sweep, and a compass at the top of the screen.
• Press O for the party window — invite anyone online with a button, answer invites, leave — no key-combos to memorize.
• Quests that are ready to turn in now say so, in gold, in the log.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• You can finally SEE what everyone's doing: Cinder Bolts streak, novas and slams ring outward, heals shimmer upward — for every player on the server, not just yourself. Guards now smite with a visible bolt.
• Other players are tinted their own colour, so the party stops looking like quadruplets.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Re-adding a server with the same label in the menu now updates its address (and keeps your saved invite) — made for cloud servers whose address changes between sessions.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Chat! Press Enter to talk, `/p` speaks to your party, and join/leave notices land in the same log.
• Graveyards: dying now wakes you at the torch-lit graveyard nearest where you fell instead of always sending you home to the city.
• Admin invites: the host can mint invite codes with console rights, so trusted players get /commands on the dedicated server.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Parties: aim at a friend and press E to invite (Y/N to answer, U to leave). Party frames show your group's health, and kill XP and loot are shared with your party near the kill — bystanders no longer leech.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Losing the server (or being refused by one) now lands you back on the menu with an explanation instead of a frozen world.
• Everyone sees who joins and leaves, by name.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Emberhold has a home on the web — this page. Every release now lands here automatically with downloads for all three platforms.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• The game now opens on a title menu: set your name, play solo worlds (or create new ones), and save servers — address plus invite code — so joining friends is one click, no launch flags.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Servers can be invite-only: the host mints invite codes, and your character is bound to your invite — play from any computer and you're the same person.
• Choose a display name; other players now wear nameplates.
• Rude surprise removed: joining with the wrong invite or no invite gets a clear explanation instead of a silent hang.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Dedicated server mode: the world can run headless in Docker with no host player, and every release deploys it automatically.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

• Version check on join: mismatched game versions get told exactly what to download instead of failing mysteriously.

Older build — no longer hosted for download.

First shareable build — the Milestone 1 vertical slice:

• Emberhold city: a safe walled hub with vendors, trainers, gate guards, and a quest board full of postings.
• Onboarding: arrive at a wayfarer's camp, follow the breadcrumb into the city, choose your class — Warden (the wall) or Ashcaller (the spark).
• The Smouldering: a five-quest storyline ending in the Ashmaw boss fight and its guaranteed Cindersteel Blade.
• Ten side quests, quest markers (! and ?) over givers, floating combat numbers, an onboarding hint banner, and a quest log that folds finished work away.
• The city is protected from digging and building, and its guards answer in-city violence.
• Plus everything from the earlier phases: voxel terrain and building, crafting, combat, mobs, XP/talents, Mining and Cooking skills, day/night, and drop-in multiplayer.