• Maps now have a variable number of floors of increasing difficulty
  
• Each floor contains a boss, who will spawn portals to advance upon death
  
• Areas are significantly shorter and less branchy
  
• Maps end with a portal to a new Treasure Room area
  
• Maps now drop at a lower level than the current area, so reaching deeper floors is required to advance map tiers

• Locking Orbs can now be used again to change which modifier is locked
  
• Added Stygian Shards, which increase the tier of a map
  
• Added a powerful new maximum-rarity Unique Belt
  
• Blue Gems now have more possible modifiers, including an Increased Mana Cost Efficiency prefix and suffix

• Magnetic Rune: Attract stackable items to you
  
• Rune of Guiding Hands: Attract stackable items and items with Favored Mods to you
  
• Protection Rune: Increased local Armor, Evasion, and Energy Shield
  
• Striking Rune: Increased local Physical Damage
  
• Avarice Rune: Increased Rarity of Items Found

• All hits now deal Knockback, which monsters gain resistance to over time
  
• Fixed a bug where the Energy Shield regeneration delay could be reduced to 0
  
• Removed the cap of 90% Physical Damage Reduction from Armor
  
• Bosses now deal increasing damage for every Enrage stack they have. Monsters gain one Enrage stack per 10 seconds while in combat

• Pressing B now creates an interactable portal instead of immediately returning to town
  
• Many other small bug fixes, performance improvements, and visual enhancements

The Beta Season 3 Update is out now!

If you haven't already, make sure to join the playtest!

Let's have a look at some of the highlights from the patch, shall we?

The Sudoku-inspired gem grid is the beating heart of your character's progression journey in Tome.

This update adds a truly massive amount of depth to Tome's most foundational system, the Tome itself. The space of possibilities is busting wide open with this one.

Normally, Support Gems connect to Red Gems in their row, column, or box.

However, this update introduces new modifiers for gems which can change their connection targets.

Notice how this Yellow Gem can connect to the Red Gem through a Purple Gem?

It's theoretically possible to connect as many as 65 Support Gems to a single Red Gem if aligned correctly with these new modifiers.

Gems can now roll modifiers which scale the bonuses provided to/from its connected gems, and have a maximum of four modifiers.

For example, consider the effects provided by this gem to a single Red Gem in both its row and box (yes, they can stack):

Or, imagine what happens to the bonuses from a White Gem supporting this one:

In fact, this update even adds Purple Gems, aka Conduit Gems, whose sole function is to enhance and pass along the bonuses of the gems that target them:

Effects propagate multiplicatively through the gem chains you create in your Tome, making the benefits of a well-arranged Tome... significant:

Previously, only a single instance of a specific named gem could be inserted into your Tome. This restriction has been removed, including for Skill Gems. If you'd like to run nine copies of Heartseeker, go wild!

Red Gems now have skill levels, which power up the base damage of their spells and attacks. There are a few ways to gain levels.

Mastery Gems are a new item which may be used on a Red Gem to increase its base level. Three Mastery Gems of the same level may be combined into one of the level above it in the Tesseract.

Orange Gems are a new class of gem which can provide skill levels to eligible connected skills.

The Season 3 update introduces the Favored Mods system (aka TomeDB). While inspecting an item, hold <alt> to view the modifier pool for that item, including the minimum item level for each specific modifier tier to appear.

This system also allows you to mark modifiers as Favored. items on the ground will show a star in its name for each Favored Mod on that item.

And the item's advanced tooltip view will show which mods matched your preferences:

This system will never affect loot drops or crafting outcomes, but it does have an important role to play in the upcoming trade system.

Many new socketable Runes have been added to the game, but there's one in particular worth highlighting.

The Rune of Wayfinding is a powerful, highly-experimental new Rune which can be socketed into your boots:

It can be found as early as level 30, and grants Autopilot:

Once equipped, you can toggle Autopilot with the G key to set your character autonomously navigating along the lighted path to the area's boss, all while you fiddle with your gems. Set waypoints with your mouse as desired.

Extremely useful and convenient, yes. But: will you choose it over the other new socketable options for your boots?

All equipment which can have sockets (of sufficient item level) can roll modifiers to increase the effects of socketed items.

Additionally, equipment drops with sockets (of any rarity) also have a small chance to gain another socket, possibly exceeding the usual maximum number of sockets for items of that type.

Beyond the items mentioned here, there are many graphical and performance changes.

The minimap now has fog-of-war, can be zoomed with +/- keys, and supports a full-screen overlay mode with <tab>:

The level generation algorithm has been reworked to generate more interesting layouts, and more quickly. Areas will be larger on average.

Map bosses now always drop another map two levels higher than the current area, making item maps a viable alternative for leveling up straight from level 1.

Loot Kittens will now meow. The audio is spatialized and can be heard from any distance, enabling acquisition of their loot through acoustic triangulation. Special thanks to KN4RR for the voice work on this one.

Some major crafting system updates are in-flight but weren't quite ready in time for this patch, and I didn't want to delay the update. They'll be released in another patch in the next few weeks.

I am so very excited to see what you do with this update.

Have fun! :)

Mesh