Portalborn

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• Patch Notes·18 Sept 2026Official

  Portalborn — Recovery, Hazards, and a Better-Looking World

  Hello everyone! This one is mostly about the time between fights — and a fair amount of it is groundwork. Hero classes are going to need hazards that threaten a level-100 character, shrines worth walking to at any level, and a recovery rate that can be tuned rather than guessed at. All three of those were built on flat numbers from early in the project, so none of them could be extended without first being given a shape. That's what this update does. The changes are real and you'll feel them now, but the reason they're happening now is that hero content needs something solid to sit on. Changes Constitution now shortens how long you take to recover health out of combat. Standing in a hazardous room no longer stops you healing between fights. Hazard damage now scales with your level instead of being a fixed trickle. Shrine blessings scale with your level. Boss chambers now read differently depending on where you are. The class advance button and its related messages now all use the same word. Fixed: spirit_leech said its healing only applied below a health threshold. It heals on every cast. Recovery between fights Out-of-combat health recovery used to be a flat 2% per second for everyone. Whether you were a level-1 mage in cloth or a level-100 tank with two hundred Constitution, empty to full took about fifty seconds. Constitution now shortens it. A low-Constitution character at level 50 takes around fifteen seconds; a high-Constitution one takes around five. Level barely matters — it's your Constitution that decides. Two reasons. Constitution only ever did one thing: it made you harder to kill. That's worth points, but it never gave you anything you'd notice between fights. And a flat rate can't be tuned — there was nothing to turn. Now there's a dial, which matters when hero content starts making real demands on how fast you can get back on your feet. In-combat healing is unchanged. Potions, gear regen and healing skills all work exactly as they did. This is only th...
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• Patch Notes·18 Sept 2026Official

  Portalborn — Look, Chinese Rooms, and Gear Levels

  Hello everyone! Mostly things I found while checking yesterday's two updates — plus one genuine addition that should have been there from the start. Changes look now inspects a target, exactly like examine. It was only ever reprinting the room. help look now has an article. It didn't before. Tab completion offers targets after every inspection verb, not just some of them. Fixed Hundreds of Chinese room descriptions had English words fused into them. The three realm challenge entry rooms were entirely in English. Some equipment was generating far stronger than it should have been. Buying an item back from a merchant could reduce its level. enhance defense was refused even though the game told you to type it. Two skill descriptions described their own bonus incorrectly. look In a text game, look is how you inspect things. It's been that way in MUDs for thirty years, and Portalborn didn't do it — look sword reprinted the room description and told you nothing about the sword. It works now. look, l, ex, examine and their Chinese equivalents all inspect a target, and bare look still shows you the room as it always has. And a name that matches nothing now says so. Previously look zorblax gave you the room description again, and examine zorblax told you that you examined it and found nothing extraordinary — as though it were there. Both now tell you plainly that there's no such thing here. That second part matters more than it sounds. A command that answers with something plausible when it didn't understand you is worse than one that errors, because you have no way to know it didn't work. help look also has a proper article now, in both languages. Chinese room descriptions This is the one I'd most like Chinese players to check. Room descriptions are assembled from several phrase sets, and they were applied one after another rather than all at once. That meant a short English word in an early set could match inside a longer word and claim it before the correct full-sentence ...
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• Patch Notes·17 Sept 2026Official

  Portalborn — Market Equipment Levels

  Hello everyone! A short update, and a fix for something a player found today. Fixed: Market listings were generated at the wrong level — most items required a level you may not have had, and cost more than they should have. Slayer token kills were not counting for characters with levels spread across several classes. Several reward and loot sources were generating items at the wrong level. Changed: Equipment above your level can now be equipped. It scales down to your level and scales back up for free as you grow. The market Thank you to Naa, who reported this and identified the cause precisely enough that I could find it immediately. When I reworked progression, equipment levels moved to your highest single class level rather than your total level — the sum of every class you have levelled. The market was still generating its listings from the total. For a character with one class at 100 those are the same number, so nothing ever looked wrong. For a character spread across several classes they are not: ten classes at level 10 is a total level of 100 and a highest class level of 10. So the market was offering that character level-100 gear, at level-100 prices, which they then could not equip. The market now generates its listings at your highest class level. Prices follow, so they are lower too — a common that was being listed at 4,000 gold for that character is 400. I cannot refund the gold that was overpaid. The price a listing sold for is not recorded anywhere after the sale, so there is no way for me to work out who paid what. I am sorry about that. But the gear itself is no longer wasted, which is the next section. Equipment above your level Gear above your level used to be refused outright. Now it equips, scales down to your level, and scales back up for free as you grow — up to the level it originally was. This is not new behaviour, exactly. Your equipped gear has always done this after an ascension: it attunes down to your new level, stays on, and restores i...
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• Patch Notes·16 Sept 2026Official

  Portalborn — Skill Names, Attunement, and a Batch of Fixes

  Hello everyone! A smaller update after the last few, and mostly a corrective one. Two of these have been quietly wrong for a while and one of them has been costing people gold, so they're worth explaining properly rather than listing. The Changes Typing part of a skill name now resolves the same way on every character. An ambiguous name asks you which skill you meant instead of picking one. The Attunement Stone's preview and confirmation now show the level it will actually apply. Tab completion offers only skills a command would actually accept. Fixed: The Slick shop labelled items with the wrong level. The portal-sync notice appeared in one zone where nothing had synced, and stayed silent in another where it had. help titled the article with the word you typed rather than the skill it found. Typing part of a skill name If you type cast crack rather than the full name, the game finds the skill you meant. That has always worked. What it did not do was find the same skill every time. Your classes are stored in the order you learned them, and the search walked them one at a time — so a partial name that matched skills in two different classes resolved to whichever class came first on that particular character. A Warrior who later took Paladin and a Paladin who later took Warrior would type guard and cast two different spells. Neither was wrong, exactly; they just disagreed. There is now one rule, applied across all your unlocked classes at once. An exact name always wins. Otherwise the game matches from the start of a word in English, or anywhere in the name in Chinese, since Chinese has no word breaks. And when a partial name genuinely matches more than one skill, it now tells you. Previously it picked one silently. Now you get the candidates and nothing is cast: 'guard' could mean more than one skill: bastion_guard, halo_guard, prism_guard. Type more of the name. Nothing is spent — no mana, no action, no turn. Every shorthand that worked before still works; only the ...
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• Patch Notes·15 Sept 2026Official

  Portalborn — Elements & Reactions in the Player Guide

  Hello everyone! A smaller update, and a documentation one. The elemental system has been in the game for a while now with no explanation anywhere outside the patch notes it arrived in — and patch notes sink out of sight. So it now has a proper page in the Player Guide. The new page Elements & Reactions sits directly after Combat in the guide, and covers: How an element lingers on an enemy after a skill hits it, and how your next hit spends it. Every reaction, in a table: which pair causes it, in which order, and what it does. Including that an ordinary weapon swing is a hit with no element — which is what shatters frost. How a reaction's size is decided, and why a weapon swing and a skill produce different amounts. That an enemy carries only one lingering element at a time, and which skills replace it. Earth and Wind, which never linger and never react — they change whose turn it is instead. Which classes carry which element, and at what level you first meet each one. The reaction table and the class list are both built from the game's own data, so they cannot drift out of date when something changes. The Combat page The Combat page now describes an enemy's turn: that every enemy attacks twice a round, that each attack can be dodged separately, and the limit on how much one enemy can take from you in a single round. It also explains the glancing-blow line you'll see when an attack is stopped completely. Also help reactions now has an entry in the command directory, so you can find it without knowing it exists. help elements now works too, since that's the word most people would try first. Fixed: Nothing, this time. This one is purely explanation. Thank you all. This is the sort of thing that's easy to put off forever, and a few of you asking questions that the guide should have answered is what moved it up the list.
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