Changelog

The real update history of Wanderer — what shipped, when, and why. Longer write-ups of the bigger items appear on the blog.

August 2026

4 August — The Trades Update

The ore chain earns 20% more. Mining, Smelting and Smithing all pay a fifth more XP per action, on top of the July increases.
The side trades earn considerably more. Foraging is up 20%, Fishing pays 3×, Stonecutting and Cooking 5×, Sawmilling 7× and Carpentry 10×. The multipliers scale with how much gathering and travel each skill demands before a single point can be earned.
Existing XP was raised to match. Every player's banked XP in all nine skills was multiplied by that skill's new rate in a one-off pass, so nobody who had already invested in a trade starts behind a player beginning today. The largest single jump was a Cooking 26 becoming a Cooking 37.
Listed XP now equals earned XP. The figures shown by the forge, sawmill, carpenter's bench and cooking pot are the figures actually banked; the two could previously drift apart. Worn cosmetic bonuses and event multipliers still stack on top. The Mining and Foraging travel-mode pickers were quoting pre-buff figures for the same reason, and now read from the same source the action itself uses.
Fourteen carpenter-built bows. One every 10 Carpentry levels from 10 to 140, each named for the wood it is cut from and matching that tier's sword for combat stats, with a six-tile engagement range. Built from three staves of their own wood plus one plank of each older wood as backing (3 planks of one wood up to 7 planks of five). Bows cannot be smithed — the carpenter's bench is their only source — and each has its own artwork.
Carpentry can fail, and can excel. The bench now rolls for success on the same curve as the anvil, salvaging about half the planks from a botched craft, and rolls for quality on the Standard→Relic ladder so bows can come out Rare or better.
Carpenter's mallets. Nine rungs from Beech to Pale Deadwood, raising success and quality odds from +0% to +34%. The first is cut with the woodcutter's axe you already own, and each one after that with the rung below it — held, never consumed. The Fishing Rod stays outside the tool gate.
Every bar in the Smelting picker. Smelting travel mode lists all 11 bar recipes as a recipe book, with locked and short-of-ore entries visible and explained, instead of hiding everything you could not make that moment.

July 2026

31 July — The Eastern Roads Update

Distinct foraging harvests. Bushes and mushroom patches now yield seven matching foods across Foraging levels 0, 20 and 40, with distinct names, colours and inventory icons.
Readable resource recovery. Bushes, mushrooms and stone nodes visibly change between ready and depleted states while regrowing, and their interaction sheen is subtler.
Production XP increased. Mining awards 20% more XP, Smelting 15% more and Smithing 10% more, on top of existing rewards.
Tiered fishing catches. River Trout, Silver Pike and Golden Koi unlock at Fishing levels 1, 20 and 40. Higher fish roll first, and every raw catch keeps for 24 hours.
Expanded campfire cooking. Ten new recipes turn fish and eastern forage into meals. Early healing is restrained, while the Cooking 25 and 50 feasts restore 25% and 30% of maximum health.
Distinct timber by tree. Every harvestable tree now has matching named logs and planks in 12-level Woodcutting steps, including Old Veyr's Pale Deadwood, with tiered sawmill recipes and revised house costs.
Directed gathering modes. Woodcutting and Foraging travel can target one unlocked resource with its requirement and XP shown; Any keeps the original nearest-resource behaviour.
Movement choices survive relocation. Death, teleports and reconnecting keep the selected movement mode, discard stale targets and choose a valid new route.
Optional weak-monster avoidance. Ordinary surface monsters can ignore players who are at least 30 combat levels stronger, while bosses, mini-bosses and instanced enemies remain aggressive.
Monsters got weaker. Health, attack, strength and defence have come down partway back toward their original levels, easing the midgame while keeping the eastern frontier substantially stronger than before the rebalance.
Reduced monster combat XP. Monster kills award 15% less combat XP across ordinary, boss, mini-boss and legendary encounters, including offline combat.
Broader high-tier loot. Azure-and-higher monsters now also draw from increasingly broad lower-tier gear pools alongside their matching set, without reducing the overall equipment-drop chance.
Aligned equipment progression. Gear requirements now match the Smithing level needed to forge the tier, and monsters can begin dropping it from 1.3 times that shared requirement.
Battle results wait for the finish. Boss and elite announcements, defeat screens and revival occur only after the matching battle animation has played.
Teleport scroll readouts stay current. A scroll now refreshes the displayed tile, distance from Wanderer's Rest and region together.
Revival respects your progress. Live and offline defeats wake you in the nearest unlocked town that is no farther east than where you fell.
Panels fit and behave. Character, Skills, Inventory and Shop stay focused on wide screens; News keeps its Close button visible, and tutorial tips wait for other dialogs.
Mining messages match both swings. Double-swing feedback distinguishes two hits, one hit and two misses, so its ore and XP agree with both independent rolls.
Every kill pays. The minimum monster coin reward is now 1 instead of 0.
Offline Explore knows its limits. It continues east only while the land ahead suits the player's level, and turns back before carrying them into overwhelming territory.
Tap outside to close. Tapping the world or shaded area closes dialogs, panels, settings, chat and the map without also sending the character walking.
Farlight Landing is open. The first town beyond the Forgotten Sanctum has a general store, forge, bounty board, three new faces and a long-silent great winch.

28 July — Stonecutting, house extensions, a bigger pack and food that goes off

Stonecutting — a new skill. The boulders, rock piles and loose rocks scattered across the world can now be worked with a pickaxe for Stone, a bulk building material. It behaves like mining rather than foraging: your pickaxe's tier drives both the success roll and the double-swing, a worked rock never runs out, and there's a Stonecutting travel mode that walks to the nearest workable rock and keeps at it. Ordinary rocks open at level 1, rock piles at 5, boulders at 10 and great boulders at 20.
Extend your house. A finished house can now be extended twice. Level 2 costs 1,000 Stone, 1,000 Logs and 1,000,000 gold and takes the storage cabinet from 10 items to 20; level 3 costs 3,000 Stone, 2,000 Logs and 3,000,000 gold and takes it to 30. There's no build timer — what you're buying is space, so it takes effect on the spot. Buy it from the house line in the store or at the building site itself.
Five more pack expansions. The Expand Inventory ladder no longer stops at 100 slots — it now runs to 125. The price keeps doubling, so these are deep end-game purchases rather than everyday ones.
Five more hours of offline travel. The offline-travel cap you can buy at the store rises from 12 hours to 17. Banked ad-boost time still stacks on top of that.
Your house is now on the shop counter. The whole build — level the land, build the house, then extend it — appears as one line in the store that always shows the next step, what it costs and how long it takes. You can still start it from the building site as before.
Raw Fish now spoils. A catch keeps for 24 hours and is then thrown away, in your pack or in your house cabinet. Each stack shows its own countdown, going amber in the last hour, and a stack is as old as its oldest fish — topping it up with a fresh catch does not reset the clock. Cook it or eat it before it turns.
The storage cabinet catches the light. Your house cabinet now has the same glow every other usable thing in the world has, so it reads as something you can tap.
Denser Inventory, Character and Shop screens. Item rows are about half as tall as they were: Use, Eat, Lock and Sell now sit on the same line as the item name, pushed right, and the text is sized to match the Skills screen. Six items fit on a phone screen where two and a half did before, and shop item names no longer get cut off mid-word.

27 July — Graphics controls, cooler phones & chat that speaks your language

A Graphics screen in Settings. Four presets — Ultra Low, Low, Balanced and High — plus a frame-rate cap, render quality, and individual switches for particles, weather, shadows, lighting, screen shake, object density and more. Nothing in it changes gameplay: it is purely how much work your phone does to draw the world.
Low-Power Mode. One switch that cuts effects, battery use, heat and graphical workload on phones that run hot or struggle. You can still fine-tune everything afterwards.
The game eases off when you're not looking. Minimised or in the background, it drops to a trickle of frames instead of drawing at full speed. Your idle progress carries on exactly as before.
Quest arrows never leave you stranded. A quest step inside a cave or dungeon now points back to the entrance whenever you are outside it, so dying to a boss no longer means hunting for the door.
Tap the quest tracker. Tapping the quest box on screen opens the full objective and its hint; the × still just dismisses it.
Chat translation follows your language. Switching languages now re-translates the chat you are looking at, instead of leaving it in the language you just left.
Chat translation works in every language. Only Spanish was actually being delivered — French, German and the rest silently timed out. All of them are live now.
Chinese messages translate properly. Short Chinese lines were being mistaken for Korean and came out as gibberish, or stayed in Chinese while claiming to be translated. Both are fixed.

23 July — Smelting becomes its own skill

The forge is now two skills, not one. Smithing used to cover both jobs — melting ore into bars at the furnace and hammering bars into gear at the anvil. The furnace half is now its own skill, Smelting, so the two can be balanced and levelled separately. Smelting a bar trains Smelting; forging gear or a tool trains Smithing.
Your old Smithing progress was split in two. Everyone's Smithing XP was divided evenly into the new Smelting and Smithing skills, so both start populated — no progress was lost, and your total skill XP is unchanged. You will see a few Smithing levels "disappear" into the new Smelting bar; that's the split, not a bug.
You keep every recipe you could already make. Even where the split drops you below a recipe's level, a grandfather rule keeps that recipe available — but your success and bonus-bar odds follow your real, current level, so the lost levels are worth re-earning.
Travel modes split too. "Smithing" auto-travel is now two modes — pick Smelting to run the furnace or Smithing to run the anvil.

21 July — Usable things now catch the light

Anything you can actually use now shows it. Ore rocks, choppable trees, cave mouths, fountains and wells, town noticeboards and bounty boards, and the forge's furnace, anvil and tempering bench all carry a faint green sheen that sweeps across them every few seconds — so a glance tells you what's worth tapping instead of hunting for it.
Hovering makes it obvious. Point at one and its sweep runs continuously and a little brighter, so you can sweep a busy town square and see what responds.

21 July — Gear recipe rebalance

Five gear sets now cost materials that match their tier. Ember, Shadow, Ivory, Ancient and Ashen were craftable from bars far below their rung — Ember (80) and Shadow (90) in particular were built from Steel, cheaper than the Aethersteel the tiers below them require. They now read: Ember = Aethersteel + Steel + Coal; Shadow = Aethersteel + Steel + Silver; Ivory = Starforged + Steel; Ancient = Starforged + Gold + Bronze; Ashen = Starforged + Aethersteel + 2 Coal.
They pay more XP to match. Smithing XP is weighted by the real ore behind a recipe, so these five now award 33–74% more per craft. Required Smithing levels are unchanged.

21 July — Announcements, tools & UI polish

Relic finds are announced to everyone. When any player obtains an Iron-tier-or-better Relic piece — from a drop, the forge, or the tempering bench — a server-wide banner celebrates it in glowing gold. Boss-kill announcements got the same treatment in blue, and both now sit longer on screen (and queue up if several land at once) so you never miss one.
Tools show their bonuses. Pickaxes, tongs and smith hammers now spell out exactly what each tier gives — Mine/Smelt/Smith success, Double Swing, bonus-bar and higher-rarity chances — instead of a generic description. Empty tool slots keep the plain "what goes here" hint.
Tempering: sort & filter your gear. The bench's gear list now sorts by Rarity (default), Value, Type or Name, and filters to a single gear type.
Tabs remember their own scroll. Character, Inventory, Skills and Shop each keep their own scroll position instead of inheriting the last tab's.

21 July — Manual travel by default

Manual is now the default way to travel. New and returning players start in Manual — stand still, tap to walk, tap a foe to attack — instead of automatically wandering east.
Your travel mode is remembered. Whatever mode you pick — Explore, Hunt, Mining, Smithing, and now Manual too — sticks across server restarts and reloads, so an update never resets how you're travelling.

21 July — The Crafting Update

Double Swing (mining). Every mining action can now swing twice in a single tick. Each swing rolls its own success, and the better your pickaxe and the more you've out-levelled a rock, the more often it fires.
Bonus bars (smelting). A successful pour can throw a second bar for free — one extra roll, so a pour gives one or two bars, never more. Better tongs raise the odds.
Higher-rarity forged gear. Forged pieces now start Standard and can climb Refined → Rare → Epic → Relic by chance. Forge above a recipe's level with a good smith hammer to improve your odds.

20 July — Tongs, hammers & moderation

Forge tools. Smelting now needs a pair of tongs and forging needs a smith hammer — each a Bronze→Celestial ladder that also raises your success rate. Every craft rolls for success, and a failed one salvages about half its materials.
Moderation tools. Warnings, mutes and auto-escalation, with mutes enforced across both in-game chat and Discord.

19 July — Supporter, cosmetics, a living world & loot

Supporter subscription (web). Back the game for $2.99/month.
Cosmetic slots. New hat and cape slots — stat-free, purely for how you look.
A more alive world. Daily bounty boards and interactive spots across 18 towns and waystations.
A second cave. The Understory, beneath Hollowbrook — behind a locked door and its single-use key.
Loot rebalance. Boss drops are now a chance rather than guaranteed, and the very top rarities are rarer at high level.

18 July — Cinematic, translations & offline XP

Opening cinematic. A 73-second intro now sets the scene for new wanderers.
Full translations. Simplified Chinese, Spanish and French are now complete.
Offline gathering XP is shown. The away summary now lists the XP you earned per skill (with a toast), closing a gap where mining/woodcutting XP looked missing.

17 July — Monsters, caves & performance

80+ monsters redesigned with fresh, bespoke art.
Caves arrived. The first underground system — Waykeeper's Hollow — opens off the road.
Hollowbrook rebuilt to the current town standard.
Phone performance. A frame-rate cap and low-power rendering options cut heat and battery drain, alongside server stability and speed improvements.

15 July — Smithing rebalance, tool slots & lock cleanup

Smithing XP is now resource-weighted. Every recipe's XP is computed from the total ore behind it — a Steel Bar (3 ore) finally pays properly against an Iron Bar (1 ore). One formula covers smelting, tools and gear; recipes now show their XP at the forge. Iron-tier rewards are unchanged; nearly everything between iron and endgame got a raise.
Pickaxes and axes are equippable. Two new tool slots on the character panel. Your best held pickaxe and axe equip themselves at login, freeing pack space — and tools keep working from pack or slot alike, so nothing interrupts an auto-mine.
Locking simplified. A locked stack can never be sold (tap-sell or Sell All), but now stacks and spends normally at the forge — the 🔒 means exactly one thing.

14 July — The Wanderer blog

The blog went live at /blog — patch notes, development diaries and world lore.

Early July — Castles, town walls & the market pass

Six regional castles now anchor the road — pulled up to the roadside and set into their towns' walls, replacing the old flat citadel sprites (8 July).
Town defences: an ongoing per-town wall pass is giving every settlement bespoke wall art — the first thirteen towns are done, from Wanderer's Rest out past Blackroot.
3D market buildings: town shops, inns and halls are being rebuilt one town at a time with dimensional building art, starting at Wanderer's Rest.
The Daybreak Line: a handcrafted set-piece scene at the old world's edge (4 July).
HUD and map polish: town coordinates on the world map, a readable distance pill, and monster levels displayed on a scale closer to player levels (6 July).

3 July — Zone 3: the road doubles

The corridor doubled in length. Sixteen new regions — from the Gilded Vale to the Forgotten Sanctum — with their own ground art, geography, and handcrafted features.
Fifteen bespoke settlements with NPCs; landmark set-pieces throughout.
Bestiary grown by 71 creatures with bespoke art; monster progression extended to level 400; sixteen new boss lairs with unique sprites; new regional music.
Ambient wildlife added across zones 2–3; scatter, groves and coastal props to liven the long stretches; civic-ruin texture for Old Veyr, Veyrath and the Sanctum.
The public website launched at playwanderer.online, with the game moving to /game/.

June 2026

26–30 June — The big balance week

XP curve halved — levelling is now twice as fast across all skills.
Equipment requirements halved — the gear ladder now runs level 1–250, with under-level gear wearable at reduced effectiveness (soft equip).
Drops reworked: monsters drop level-appropriate gear (three tiers around their level) on a fixed per-tier chance ladder.
Offline combat retuned: slower explore rate and honest fight durations, plus a fix for double offline catch-up on racing logins.
Monster art overhaul: bespoke silhouettes replacing recolours, element-tinted battle VFX, fixed sprite slicing/clipping; NPC art grew from 5 to 15 distinct roles.
Skill guides menu in-game; full smelting recipe book at the furnace.

Earlier

June's world redesign turned Wanderer's original radial map into today's single east–west corridor — the Long Road — with difficulty rising eastward. The full story of that decision is told in About Wanderer and on the blog.