May 15 Update: Skill Tree, Magic, Performance & What Comes Next

Hello everyone 🖤

Tomorrow is update day.

This has been one of those development phases where a lot of the work is not always easy to show in a single screenshot. Some features are obvious the moment you open a menu or cast a spell. Others are hidden inside logic, optimization, animation timing, loot tables, vendor rules, UI states, localization, and all the small fixes that make a build feel much more stable.

So before the May 15 update arrives, we wanted to walk you through where things landed, what made it into this build, and what is coming shortly after.

Skill Tree Is Here

The biggest part of this update is the Skill Tree, and we’re happy to say that it is now complete and included in the May 15 build.

This is no longer just a visible UI or a work-in-progress system behind the scenes. Skill unlocking, attribute handling, companion progression, resources, node states, UI feedback, icon frames, button sounds, and the overall structure are now fully in place.

Weapon Skills and Combat Skills are implemented and working. Magic Skills have also moved from “planned” to playable. Venom Storm, Doom Shroud, and Goddess Grace now have their effects, audio, and gameplay logic in place, giving you real build options beyond weapon-focused combat.

Healing magic in particular changes the feel of party combat. Goddess Grace now works as a proper support spell, giving you another way to keep both yourself and nearby companions alive. Potions are still something you actively manage through hotkeys, even when using them for companions, but healing magic behaves more naturally. Companions can cast it on their own when needed, which makes party survival feel less manual and gives support-oriented builds a much clearer role.

This also makes Wisdom and Intellect feel much more meaningful than before, especially if you want to build around survivability, magic, or hybrid playstyles.

Since the Skill Tree changes how characters grow and how powerful different builds can become, we’ll be watching balance closely after the update. Some levels may feel easier or harder than before depending on your build, party setup, and skill choices. If that happens, the next step won’t be more Skill Tree development, it will be level and encounter balancing around the new progression system.

For us, this is a major milestone. The Skill Tree is now the core progression system we wanted it to be, and we’re excited to finally get it into your hands.

Combat, Animation & Body Physics Polish

A lot of combat work in this update was about making things feel smoother and more reliable rather than simply adding another flashy move.

Several special attacks and Fury attacks received new or updated VFX, audio, timing, root motion, and impact feedback. Weapons like the Dagger, Great Spear, Great Mace, Great Axe, Staff, and Great Sword all received attention in different ways. Some attacks needed better trails, some needed stronger impact sounds, some needed animation timing changes, and some needed fixes so movement and hit moments lined up properly.

We also continued reducing stutter and awkward transitions in attack chains. Attack buffers, blend timing, root motion, dual wield behavior, great weapon movement, and ranged damage variance all received work. These are the kinds of changes that are easy to miss in a patch note, but they matter a lot when you are actually playing.

The character movement also received another polish pass. Walk animations, twist bones, skinning, body movement, and jiggle physics have been improved so characters feel less stiff and more natural in motion. This touches gameplay, posing, character previews, and the general feel of watching your party move through the world.

Performance & Lower Settings

We also spent a lot of time on performance and lower graphics settings.

Lunar Palace received a major optimization pass. In one of our heavier scenes, draw calls were reduced from roughly 30,000 to around 1,200. That kind of work is not very glamorous from the outside, but it is extremely important for making the game run better and giving us more room to improve visuals without pushing performance too far.

Materials, shaders, lighting, reflections, transparent objects, and texture sizes also received optimization work. Some shaders were simplified, some expensive visuals were adjusted, and some lighting distances were tuned to reduce unnecessary cost.

Lower settings received special attention as well. Cistern, Crossroads, and Fugitive Camp should now look better on lower graphics settings. We fixed cases where lighting could become too dark, too bright, or lose the intended atmosphere. A new post-process fog setup was also added to help preserve the mood of certain areas while still supporting performance.

This is an ongoing effort, but this update should already feel better for players who are not running the game on high settings.

Gear, Outfits & World Fixes

Some of the outfit work from previous newsletters also moved from “visual rework” into the less visible but very necessary integration stage.

Coarse Leather, Apprentice gear, and Bazaar Cutpurse all received additional fixes, adjustments, icons, skinning work, morph support, belt and shoulder updates, localization, and loot table integration. This is the part of gear development that often takes longer than expected. It is not enough for an outfit to look good in a render. It also has to work with body morphs, companions, icons, inventory data, equipment slots, loot rules, selection screens, and character previews.

We also continued improving the nudity filter setup. The new minimal underwear layer is now much closer to what we wanted visually, and it behaves better with the overall character aesthetic.

Outside of gear, there were many fixes across levels and encounters. Some enemies that could get stuck were adjusted, navigation was cleaned up in several places, companion behavior issues were fixed, some combat-level seating problems were corrected, boss behavior received attention, and various map, quest, collision, chest, and level completion issues were addressed.

Localization also received another pass, including new translation imports and Turkish text corrections.

Lingerie, Tattoo & The Follow-Up Plan

We know some of you were hoping to see lingerie & tattoos in this update. We were hoping for that too.

The good news is that the first lingerie sets and tattoo designs already exist, and work on the system has started. The reason it is not included in the May 15 build is that we do not want it to be a simple “buy an icon and guess what it looks like” feature.

The lingerie system is actually a more involved mechanic. Lucieta will sell these pieces through a separate flow, and they will use Emeralds instead of regular gold. We also want our players to be able to preview how a piece looks before buying it. Since lingerie is so visual by nature, selling it only through icons would feel wrong.

That means the vendor, currency, preview behavior, item setup, transparency handling, shaders, UI, and character display all need to work properly before we ship it.

So we are holding it back from this build rather than forcing it into a rough version. Our current plan is to add it in a follow-up update within 1–2 weeks after May 15.

Looking Ahead

The May 15 update is mostly about making the game deeper, smoother, and more stable.

The Skill Tree is the headline feature, but a lot of important work happened around it: healing magic, spell integration, combat polish, animation fixes, performance improvements, lower-setting visuals, outfit integration, body physics, bug fixes, and groundwork for the lingerie system.

Thank you for being patient with us while we build these larger systems properly. We know some features take longer than expected, but we would rather take the extra time than release them in a state that does not feel good enough.

More soon 🖤

The Team ⚔️