Pre-Alpha Development Update #1
Welcome to the first official development update for Ethyrial: Life Rewritten. From here on, we'll be publishing these dispatches regularly — unvarnished, engineer-to-player, with real progress and real setbacks.
The Skill Web
The classless progression system — internally, the Skill Web — reached its first playable milestone this month. Every skill in Ethyrial improves through use, and adjacent skills reinforce one another: a smith who fights with their own hammers strikes harder; a forager who cooks learns which herbs do more than season.
This month we:
- Wired all 34 launch skills into the web with live cross-bonuses
- Rebuilt the XP curve so early levels feel generous and mastery feels earned
- Added the first pass of the in-game web visualizer (it looks like a constellation, and we're keeping it that way)
A Thousand Days of Economy
We ran the living economy simulation for one thousand in-game days with 5,000 simulated agents. The good news: regional prices diverged exactly the way we hoped — ore-rich Caedra undercut everyone on metal while coastal Irenhal cornered salt and sail. The bad news: around day 600, the agents discovered they could corner the arrow market before a war event. We're not fixing that one. That's a feature.
Combat Timing Rework
Swing timing now commits earlier and telegraphs longer, which makes reading an opponent an actual skill rather than a latency check. Parries feel heavy now. More on the combat philosophy in a dedicated post soon.
Next update, we'll talk about kingdom claims and what happens when two guilds want the same river. Join the Discord to argue about it in advance.
— The Distant Visions Team