Greater boons
Challenge Mode used to reward you with a time on a podium. Now it also rewards you with a build. Each time you clear a difficulty, the screen fades to black and three crystal balls appear, each burning in its own colour: gold for the sword, green for the bow, blue for magic, white for the ones that help everything. Hover one to see what it does, pick it, and it rises off the top of the screen while the other two dissolve. Back in the castle, it hangs over your head for a moment, then sinks into you. You get three over a full gauntlet.
The first offer always gives you one choice per weapon. The second offers another for the weapon you picked, one general boon and one wildcard. The third is random. There are nine to find:
- Restless Swing (sword). Alternate light and heavy attacks and the combo keeps going for as long as your stamina lasts. Repeat an attack to end it with a finisher that hits harder the longer the string. The blade catches fire as the combo grows, and a counter on the HUD keeps score.
- Unstoppable Fortress (sword). Every block adds a stack of armour for eight seconds, up to five, and blocked hits strain your guard half as much. At five stacks you have hyper armour until the buff runs out.
- Blind Precision (bow). Arrows fired from the hip seek the nearest enemies, every one counts as a headshot, and you shoot one more of them.
- Split Shower (bow). Rain of Arrows has no cooldown and falls once per arrow you would shoot, at twice the stamina and one arrow per area.
- Mind Focus (magic). Channelling is twice as fast, and a fully channelled cast hits twice as hard over a wider area, for twice the mana.
- Kinetic Blast (magic). Half the damage you take is banked into your next force push. A percentage on the HUD shows the bank, and the fuller it is, the wider and harder the shove. Enemies slammed into walls, doors or furniture take extra damage.
- Berserker. Stuns end sooner and leave you berserk: faster movement, faster attacks, shorter cooldowns, quicker aim and some life steal.
- Endless Resources. While time is slowed, nothing costs stamina, mana or arrows.
- Boontiful. Every normal boon gives half again as much. The pause screen now shows the real total each boon is giving you, so you can see it working.
Buffs with a timer, like the Fortress stacks, now sit in a small strip of icons above your level and gold, each with its countdown.
The shrine is a skill tree
The shrine's upgrades used to be a list. They are now one radial constellation: the shrine flame in the middle, general upgrades in rings around it, and the sword, bow and magic each growing along their own branch. There are no tabs. Every node has an icon and wears its weapon's colour, so a sword upgrade and a bow upgrade never look alike, and you can see at a glance what you can afford and what is still out of reach. The costs, the rules and your saved progress did not change; only the way you read them did.
Built for thumbs
A lot of people open Wardenfall from a link on their phone, and this batch is mostly for them.
- Aiming the bow. Hold the aim button to draw, drag the same thumb to steer, and let go to shoot. A light aim assist helps the arrow find its target.
- Blocking. With the sword or magic, hold the block button and drag it to turn your guard toward the attack. Magic now has its own block button too.
- Camera sensitivity. Touch players get their own camera sensitivity slider in Settings.
- A smaller HUD. Health, stamina, mana, experience and gold took too much of a phone screen. The HUD is smaller on phones by default, and there is a size setting if you want it bigger or smaller still.
Magic that looks like magic
The fireball is now a comet in flight, with a burning orb that grows in your hand while you channel. It also bursts the barrels and crates it flies over or explodes among again, which had quietly stopped working. The force push borrows the Warden's leap slam: the same shockwave, in blue. Channelling no longer wraps you in an aura; instead, blue or red motes gather around you, more of them the longer you hold it. A channel now fires on its own the moment it is full. With Mind Focus, the blast grows with the charge instead of jumping to its full size on a quick tap.
Enemies you can read
- The Warden telegraphs. His fists catch fire during his unblockable attack and during his leap, and the leap's aftershock is a wall of fire. If his hands are burning, roll. The Warden Reborn's scream now uses the old sword power-up animation, which reads as a man gathering himself rather than a man yawning.
- The axeman fights in combos. He throws a left swing, a right swing and an overhead as a three-hit string. His whirlwind is slower, so if the first hit catches you, you still have time to escape the other two.
- Damage you can see. When you hit an enemy, the chunk you took off its health bar turns dark red, and the posture you broke turns dark yellow. Both linger for two seconds, resetting with every new hit, so you can read how much a combo actually did.
Also
The game has a proper home page now. wardenfall.onesitting.studio opens on a page with the controls, a FAQ and these patch notes, and the game itself is one click away at /play/. If you installed Wardenfall on your home screen, nothing changes: it still opens straight into the game.
Play Wardenfall, and tell us which greater boon you took on the contact page.
Published on 4 October 2026 with the first batch of devlog entries. Drafted from the project's commit log and decision records with AI writing tools, then edited by Alexis Rivard.