Hello everyone! Today, we are excited to present the updated 2025 Roadmap for Stoneshard. But before diving into the details, we'd like to take a brief look back at the development of Rags to Riches. Rags to Riches was a major success for our team. That update brought the highest number of players since the game's Early Access launch, received a wealth of positive feedback, and showed a significant increase in engagement compared to previous releases. We are incredibly grateful for this warm reception and hope that future content will continue to meet your expectations. However, as many of you may remember, the development of Rags to Riches proved to be long and arduous. While the complexity of the new features played a major role in it, we also had to devote significant effort to extensive reworks of many existing systems to ensure the seamless integration of all the planned content. It wasn't uncommon for the development of one system to necessitate changes in several others, sometimes to the point of adding new systems altogether. Splitting these changes and additions across multiple updates or postponing them wasn't really an option, as certain core elements like the Caravan, reworked Contracts, Dungeons, the World Map, and numerous smaller but technically crucial features are all deeply interconnected. This quickly turned into a true Gordian knot of conditions and dependencies. Untangling it took a great deal of time, ultimately leading to the substantial delay of that patch compared to previous ones. Fortunately, now that we have added one of the last truly large and comprehensive systems - the Caravan - we hope to release future updates more regularly. Unlike Rags to Riches, the remaining mechanics and content follow a fairly modular structure. To sum it up, we aim for smaller but more frequent patches. Our new Roadmap reflects this change as well, moving away from massive, standalone updates in favor of parallel content development, which will be divided into smaller releases (don't worry - they'll still have names). Because of this, the Venom in the Waters update, which was previously planned as the next major patch, has been postponed. Some of its features have been redistributed into other content blocks, since such a heavily thematic patch would have taken an unreasonably long time to develop. So, what's next for Stoneshard?
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• The first order of business is Caves. This new location type is designed to add variety to world exploration - unlike usual Dungeons, Caves won't be strictly tied to one faction, will boast more diverse visuals, and can be home to a wide range of enemies and dangers, including unique ones. It's worth noting that Caves won't be used for Contracts. Instead, they will play a key role in the reworked Task System, which we plan to introduce in one of the future patches.
• The rest of the planned features include a new school of spatial magic - Arcanistics, new quests, more Caravan Events, and the elimination of gaps in gear progression that emerged after transitioning to the tier-based system.
• We also plan to revamp the Psyche System, reworking both the existing Psyche States and the core mechanic as a whole. Our main goal is to make the entirety of it much more interactive and immersive.
• And finally, something many of you have long been waiting for: we are officially beginning work on the Character Creator. We have plenty of ideas and concepts for how this system should function (the recent overhaul of Character Traits should serve as a small teaser for the direction we're taking). Combined with the Trait System, this will be an incredibly complex and resource-intensive task, making it difficult to predict an exact timeline - all we can say is that it will be released once we're certain it's ready.