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We’re rolling out our first-ever pre-patch release, and it’s a game-changer. Unlike typical releases, you’ll get early access to brand-new features and game systems before they’re fully unlocked. This is your chance to experience these systems first-hand as we continue to expand and evolve them in the next update.

We’re excited to get the community involved in this process – Your early feedback will be crucial in shaping the final implementation, allowing us to make adjustments before the full release.

There’s no shortage of exciting, shiny content to dive into right now. Below is a brief overview of what’s in store for you. Get ready for the next iteration of Soulbound.

Halloweeb ?

Halloweeb is here again, and Soulbound is looking spookier than ever! This year’s Halloween event runs from today until the 3rd November. Halloween Tokens are back, and you’ll find them by doing a number of different activities around Soulbound. Try your luck in dungeon chests, salvage spooky gravestones, or grow them straight from the ground with the new pumpkin seeds!

Getting Started

Head over to Sabrina in Virelda to earn yourself a FREE daily Halloween Loot Box just for taking part in the event. Mine gravestones that spawn in the dungeons, open chests, and grow pumpkins to find tokens which you can spend over at the Halloween CartVendor.

Rewards

This year we’re bringing you two limited new pets, a set of spooky furniture, cosmetic wearables, exclusive OP Halloween consumables, and we’re also bringing back some of our favourite Halloween mounts. Spend your Halloween Tokens wisely, as the vendor and tokens won’t be available again after the event closes. At the end of the event, all Halloween tokens will be evaporate from your bag or bank, as if by some spooky magic spell.

Dungeon Tiers

We’ve revamped the dungeon system into what we now call “dungeon tiers.” Each dungeon now has its own difficulty level, which is tied to gear and progression. The goal is to let new players complete the easier tiers with base gear, while reserving the harder tiers for more advanced gear.

To smooth the new player experience, early tiers have no bag loss, and as you progress, both loot drops and bag loss increase. Our hope is that this system allows players to complete full runs without being overly restricted by gear requirements at each stage.

For those already established in the game, your current power level will place you around the middle of Tier II. Here, you’ll find new content and an overall fresh feel to the dungeons. The three distinct areas within the dungeons each offer different resources and skill focuses. This variety encourages players to choose dungeons that align with the specific skills they want to improve and the loot they’re seeking.

We’ve taken a new approach to gear progression to create a more rewarding experience. Previously, gear requirements were too restrictive, preventing players from advancing if they didn’t have specific Tier gear. In this update, we’ve loosened those restrictions, allowing more room for players to leverage their skill and game knowledge to progress without being gated by gear alone.

Land & Apartments

We’re thrilled to finally open apartments! This long-awaited feature is rolling out in its first iteration, and we couldn’t be more excited. Here’s how it works: to access your apartment, simply enter your NFT token ID number into the apartment keypad. You’ll be able to do this from Arcadia, making it easy to jump right in.

We want to take a moment to explain the design space behind these apartments. It’s important to understand that this is a complex system, and we’re eager to explore how it functions with the community’s input. We’re committed to refining and improving the experience based on your feedback, so if something doesn’t feel right, let us know.

Accessing Apartments

By owning a one of our Apartment NFTs, you are automatically given your very own private space, viewable in the key items section of your bag. You can manage permissions and access controls remotely through this same interface.

To enter your land, simply visit the apartment block in Arcadia and type in your Apartment number to the keypad located by the door.

Making it your own

As the owner of an apartment, you’re able to customise it as you see fit. Any new furniture that you acquire will be placeable in the apartment.

Player-owned land will have room restrictions based on the size of the land, but these values aren’t set in stone. We’ll be actively considering all your feedback to fine-tune the system.

To help you get started, landowners will find a welcome pack in their mailbox containing your first set of furniture.

Apartment customisation still has much more to come, and we’ll talk a little bit more about what we are planning for in our next update. For now, customise your rooms and decorate them in your style to create a space just how you want it. We’re excited to see what you come up with, and how creative you can get!

The Yoku Forge

Yoshimoto has opened The Yoku Forge! You’ll find the ability to buy new furniture, check your existing furniture collection, and buy new stations by speaking to Yoshimoto within the Yoku Forge. You’ll find the Forge on the lower South East level in Arcadia.

Overworld Land Plots

For the first time in Soulbound’s history, you are now able to rent overworld locations as exclusive entrances to your apartments. These will honor the apartments permission system, just like apartments accessed through the keypad. You can decide if you want to host an open apartment for others to use, or if you’re building out an invite only guild base for your friends using the whitelist system.

We’re bringing you a first look at this feature to give you a sense of what is to come with player owned land. Its important to us that we roll this feature out steadily and with caution to align with the community and our design space.

Each overworld plot comes with its own set of unique requirements and rental price points. They all have different requirements, so get out there and explore to find the best spot for your new home. This feature is only currently available to medium sized apartments and above.

We intend to implement a bidding feature which gives everyone a chance to bid for high-demand locations and plots in the future, but for now its first come-first served. Nothing is set in stone, so don’t be surprised if we shake things up!

TLDR;

• Medium, Large and Penthouse holders can rent an overworld location giving them, and other players, direct access to their apartment.
• These locations are placed throughout the world.
• Each location has a unique rental price which you can pay weekly, or monthly.
• Some locations require various skill requirements to be met.
• You may only rent one apartment location per apartment NFT held in your connected wallet.

Player Owned Farms

Stations

One of our most long awaited features is finally here, with this update we’re implementing the first look at stations.

Stations are our way of integrating player-to-player commerce within the game world in a way that hasn’t been done before. We believe that the most exciting use case for apartments are stations. Stations allow you as a landholder to provide a service for other players. Players can use your stations to craft new gear, cook new consumables or fabricate new armour. Each station is tied to a specific skill, and using the stations will reward players with experience in these skills.

As a landholder, you can earn fees from this transaction by charging a rental rate for using your stations. If you have a busy station, in high demand because you have special perks or recipes, you can increase your rental rate and earn passive income.

As you explore Soulbound, you’ll discover recipes that allow stations to unlock more craftables. Some recipes are rare, and all of them have limited uses. To craft powerful gear, consumables, and special items, you’ll need the right combination of station levels and recipes. Start leveling up your stations now to get ready for the next update!

Currently all stations are capped at level two, with further levels being unlocked in our future releases.

Complementary Furniture

As you level up your station, you will need to place down additional nearby furniture to upgrade. These complementary furnitures allow you to offer unique perks to your customers, offering reduced costs, crafting times and recipes.

Station Progression

Using a station for its prescribed purpose awards the station with experience, and also awards you with experience in our corresponding skills. Actions like cooking food, crafting gear, and brewing consumables all award experience to both stations and players.

Your station’s level will have a strong influence on how attractive it is to other players. Landholders can levels up their stations, surround them with complementary furniture, teach them rare recipes, as you advertise your services across Soulbound to attract other players to your land. Not all of our complementary furnitures and recipes are functional yet but we’ve implemented some of them to give you an early adopter’s head start.

Stations aren’t going to be the only progression system used to improve land, soon we’ll be revealing another progression system that allows you to improve your land without a station – but more on that in our next update.

As with player-owned farms, we’ll be watching the progress of this feature very closely. Whilst we don’t intend to make any drastic changes, there’s always the potential that we need to resolve a gamebreaking issue with a swift design decision. We hope that you’ll understand that and bear with us if that ends up being the case.

What’s the vision?

In an effort to explain our current thoughts to you, we wanted to give you a brief description of how we see players interacting with the world in a way that enables a living, breathing MMO. We believe that player-to-player commerce should be the foundation for all in-game services in the game world. From banking, to crafting, to travel, to questing – we want to give you the power to do it all.

Piece by piece, we’re going to phase out the level of ‘game master’ systems that are used within Soulbound, and put the power in the hands of you – our players. This is really what player-owned land is all about, providing you with the opportunity to imprint yourselves onto our world and become a part of the furniture.

We’ve started small, and hope to make continuous improvements that will culminate in a full player-provided game world. This design was greatly inspired by academic research into real-estate markets and we hope that this design encourages landholders to use the high traffic locations for in-game commerce so that we can create a rich and vibrant game world, instead of a barren wasteland.

We acknowledge that these tools do not currently provide substantial support for landholders with multiple apartments and we hope to collect feedback from you to better understand how we can enable the management of many apartments quickly and efficiently. (We have implemented a ‘manager’ role which allows you to delegate manager controls to other players)

TLDR;

• Players will need to use the stations created by landholders in order to level up their gear and craft the best consumables in the game.
• These recipes will only be available once landholders level up their stations and find recipes.
• Landholders will be able to apply fees to stations. As players use their stations, they will earn passively.

New Skills

We’re also introducing four new skills, some of which you’ll recognise and others which have been kept under lock and key!

Fishing

Those of you who have been with us for a while will recognise this fan favourite. Fishing is back, and whilst we aren’t implemented our planned fishing evolution we are giving you a chance to have an early start at fishing levels and stockpiling rare fish. You’ll find fishing nodes in the dungeons and out in Virelda where there will be a calendared fishing event! We’ve also introduced a rare fishing loot box, which might have a few aquatic surprises hidden within.

To get started with fishing, head out to Virelda and speak with Wilson to acquire your first rod.

Hacking

Hacking is one of our new skills, and there’s a lot more to come with this skill, including an exciting new hacking themed zone which won’t be released just yet. For now we’ve enabled the skill so that you can practice your skills and gather a bit of extra loot from the dungeons. We’re really excited to announce the full plans for this feature so start levelling and stay tuned!

Crafting

The first of our new processing skills, crafting, covers actions that are done within the manufacturing table and the furnace. The higher your skills the more items you’ll be able to make! Anyone who wants to make anything useful will require a high level in this skill so good luck on your crafting journey!

Gearforging

Gearforging is split between two separate stations: the armour and the weapon stations. Both of these have their own progression trees but as long as you’re using one of them you’ll be able to hone your gearforging skill to learn to craft the ultimate gear.

New gear

We wouldn’t be doing an update without introducing some new gear for you to use. If you want to be successful in our new dungeon difficulties you’re going to need to upgrade. With the introduction of stations and land these sets will need to be crafted exclusively in player owned land! We’ve introduced a number of new weapons alongside these sets, so keep an eye out for rare new recipes.

Quests

This patch also includes a major update: a new real-time quest engine. Now, when you complete a quest task, it will update instantly, and the next task should appear right away. Before, there was a bit of lag, but now quests will feel faster and more responsive. This should make the game feel snappier and improve the overall onboarding process. So please give us your feedback when engaging with quests and NPCs.

We’ve been working hard to improve the tutorial and onboarding to make the game easier for new players. We’ve added new tooltips and info boxes to help explain things better, and there’s now a new, smoother tutorial island that’s quicker to complete.

We’ve also introduced combat in the tutorial and will continue to adjust things as we go. If you come across any odd quests, bear with us as we’re making some big changes to improve the experience.

In addition, there are several new quests! We’ve been experimenting with different ways to build quests, and some are experimental, so expect adjustments. A couple of new ones to look out for are the heist quest and one where you’ll need to sneak past guards. Get ready for those and let us know what you think!