Update 2.7: Construction & Slayer

Construction and Slayer are out, together. They are the twentieth and the twenty-first skills, and this is the largest update the game has had: two skills at once, a Slayer expansion around the second one, an attack-type layer on melee, and three interface reworks underneath it all.

Construction

You build furniture for your Holding, the plot of land beside your character, and the building itself is the reward: no item is minted, the experience is the product. Fifty repeatable pieces run from an oak chair at level one to an elder throne at ninety-nine, in six wood tiers, and each one assembles on screen stage by stage as you work. Bigger pieces take longer and cost more, but every piece in a tier earns at the same rate, so what you build is a matter of taste and pacing rather than efficiency.

It is also the first real use planks have ever had. All six tiers get sawn at the Crafting bench, and until now nothing in the game asked for a single one. Now every build starts there.

Planks are joined by two new Smithing products, nails and gold leaf, and they are the first Smithing recipes you will make over and over rather than once. Every other thing the forge turns out is a tool or an armor piece you need one of.

The Holding’s permanent works

Thirteen one-time builds are the reason to keep going. They are large projects, hundreds of inputs each, and they change how the rest of the game plays.

The Restoration Spring comes in four tiers, and every kill restores a quarter, then half, then three quarters, then all of your health. The altar comes in three: kills give back more prayer points, and buried bones earn more Prayer experience. The Steadfast Ward, three tiers again, makes stat-draining attacks sap you more slowly, then less deeply, and at the top a kill clears the drain outright. The Pantry lets you keep a second food equipped, and the Superior Garden opens a ninth and then a tenth farm patch.

Slayer

Three task masters, Brann, Vex and Karst, each hand out assignments matched to what you can handle, and you earn Slayer points for finishing them. Points buy the gear that makes the harder assignments possible.

Six creatures arrive with it, and each one has a counter you are meant to bring.

Without waxen earplugs the Banshee’s scream drains your stats far faster than you can fight through. Meet the Stonegaze Basilisk’s gaze without a mirror charm and it does the same. The Dust Devil wants reinforced goggles, or you fight all but blind and it hits far harder. Only a marrow blade or staff marks the Thornback Ravager, or broadhead arrows if you fight at range. Anything else does nothing at all. The Gargoyle takes a mason’s maul or a granite maul to break stone, and a warding censer stops the Vampyre healing off you. That last one always leaves vampyre dust behind, worth a large lump of Prayer experience when offered.

You can walk into any of these unprepared. Nothing stops you except your own level. You will simply lose.

Swords cut, mauls crush

Melee weapons now have an attack type. A blade skids off heavy plate where a maul caves it straight in, so the weapon you bring to metal armor matters as much as the tier of it. Skeletons and gargoyles come apart under crushing blows in particular. The matchup badge on the enemy’s health bar tells you when your weapon is the right one.

Granite, and three relics

Six granite pieces drop from the harder Slayer creatures. Granite is the only set in the game that asks for raw Strength as well as skill, fifty of it, and it turns aside arrows better than it does anything else.

Three relics drop alongside it. The serpentine eye sharpens your accuracy, the blackstone core adds damage, and the warding relic drains a little life back with every hit.

Drops and balance

Six drop tables were rebuilt so the Slayer creatures pay out at the density the rest of the game does. Construction pieces take considerably more work each than they did in testing, so the build animation has room to read. And every Slayer creature’s punishment for arriving without its counter was tuned by hand.

Interface

The Stats panel now fits its tab instead of leaving a stretch of empty panel below Combat and Economy. The Bank is wider and lays its sections out in two columns, which roughly halves the scrolling on a full account, and equipped gear no longer takes up space there since the Equipment panel already shows it with more detail. The collection log fills the full width of its panel, and the guide now states how many inputs a recipe takes, not just the experience it gives.

What you are chasing

Three new achievements: one for each cape, and one for finishing your first Slayer task. Two new leaderboards, Construction and Slayer, bring the total to twenty-four.

The rest of it

Saves upgrade automatically on first load. Nothing is lost and no level moves.

A gap in the leaderboard rules was closed too: a mod that quietly rewrote a recipe’s cost or its experience never used to pause uploads, and now it does. If you were already running one before this update, nothing happens to your standing.

Between Firemaking and this update, two small patches went out. 2.6.2 and 2.6.3 fixed hover text getting cut off and then taught it to wrap, put melee armor and the jewelry in Magic combat back in step with the idle sway, and stopped Farming’s identify labels drawing clipped. The full notes for everything are on Steam.

That is twenty-one skills to ninety-nine, a Holding rising plank by plank beside the character, and six creatures that expect you to pack for the trip. More when there is more.

— Vosk