Hey everyone!

We've just wrapped up our fifth month of testing.

Last month, our goals were to implement Fast Travel, complete Wild Hunter (1st and 2nd job), and rework the defense system. We managed to complete everything except Fast Travel. As development progressed, we decided to expand the system further and realized it would require considerably more work than we had originally anticipated.

Fast Travel:
Development is underway, but we've decided to pause the work for now. We'd like to spend more time refining the design and building better tooling before moving forward. Magik and I also have a few details we'd like to discuss before continuing, so we'll revisit this feature once we have a clearer vision.

Wild Hunter and Battle Mage:
The skills for both jobs are now complete. The remaining work is scripting the quests and NPCs required for character creation. Once that's finished, these classes will be available to play.

Reworked Defense System:
We went through two iterations of reworking defense and we're happy with where it has landed. Monsters now hit noticeably harder, but investing in defense is also much more meaningful. As always, we'll continue monitoring feedback and make adjustments where needed.

Side by Side Item Comparison:
Previously, hovering over an item in your inventory didn't show a comparison against your currently equipped item. It was a small quality-of-life issue that always bothered us, so we've now added a side-by-side comparison to make equipment decisions much easier.

Weekly Recaps:
End of Week Jun 7th Updates
End of Week Jun 14th Updates
End of Week Jun 21st Updates
End of Week June 28th Updates

Goals for July:
Although we didn't complete every goal as we had anticipated for June, we're happy with the overall progress we've made towards our Alpha roadmap. July will be a busier month for us personally, so we're intentionally keeping our goals a bit lighter. Here are our goals:

• Autoban System: While we already have a number of detections already in palce, they currently don't feel into a truly comprehensive autoban system. Our goal is to build the foundation for this and to take appropriate action based on detections. This will continue to evolve over time as we add more detections.
• Resistance Scripts: To finish the Resistance classes, we still need to script their quests and NPCs. We'll be making good progress on this throughout July. Though, we don't expect to have this all completed by the end of the month.

As always, we appreciate your support.

Astral Team