New content available on Arcadia for testing!

Hello Paxians,

We have new content available for testing on Arcadia, the Public Test Shard. Here are the Release notes. You can also check the full Patch notes.

New Feature: Players Dueling

Players can now challenge each other to friendly duels, allowing consensual PvP combat anywhere in the world without the risks associated with full PvP. Dueling is intended as a safe sparring system where players can practice combat, test builds, settle rivalries, or organize community events.

Starting a Duel

You can challenge another player in two ways:

• Use the command /duel <playername>,
• Use Request Duel from the player interaction menu.

The challenged player has 60 seconds to accept the request. Once accepted, the duel begins after a 3-second countdown. Pending duel requests can be cancelled using /cancelduel.

Duel Rules

• Duels are consensual and opt-in.
• Duels have a maximum duration of 10 minutes.
• Players must remain within 60 meters of the duel area.
• Duels must occur within the same zone.

When a player receives fatal damage, the duel ends, and the losing player is restored to 10 HP. Equipment takes normal combat durability damage, but death durability penalties do not apply.

Ending a Duel

A duel ends when:

• One player defeats the other.
• A player uses /forfeit to surrender.
• The 10-minute timer expires.

A duel will automatically cancel if:

• Either player moves beyond the 60-meter range.
• A third player attacks a duelist.
• An NPC attacks a duelist.
• Either player disconnects.
• Either player changes zones.

Environmental hazards such as falling, burning, drowning, or poisoning can still kill players. If this happens during a duel, the duel ends in a draw.

Third Party Interaction

Other players may heal or buff duelists during a duel. This allows players to practice combat scenarios that include support roles.

Clan and Party Training

Clan members and party members can duel each other even when PvP flagged, as long as they remain friendly or allied.

New Player Controls

Based on community feedback, additional controls and clarity have been added:

• Auto-decline duel requests can now be enabled via slash command or settings.
• Improved duel outcome messaging.
• Improved cancellation messaging to better explain why a duel ended.

Rewards

Dueling does not grant XP, loot, or system rewards. The system is designed as a training and social feature, not as a competitive progression system.

Community Feedback

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback while this feature was being developed. Your comments helped us refine several aspects of the system, including consent controls and messaging clarity. If you're interested in the full discussion and the feedback that shaped this feature, you can read it in the Feedback section on our Discord: InDev - Feedback on Upcoming Dueling System.

We will continue to monitor feedback as players begin using the system and make adjustments as needed.

Map improvements 

Added a new legend to the player map for both the biomes and the icons.

• Added toggle functionality for each of the icon types to give the player full authority on what to show on the map.
• The zoom-out level has been increased.
• The compass will show the toggled indicators/icons.

Market Stalls

The Heartlands market search has been expanded to make it easier to find items.

You can now:

• Search for items by name using the market search field,
• Sort listings by item name.

Building System Optimization

As we all know, building in Pax Dei is the crown jewel of the game. We’re amazed by the community's creativity, and it’s common for a dev to share images of yet another amazing creation with the rest of the team. When the game launched, we were thrilled to offer creative freedom to each of you that enabled all of this, but at the same time, slightly nervous about the implications of allowing such power to be wielded by all of you. What ended up happening was the obvious - as the skill of the builders grew, so did the amount of content in each of the Home Valleys. And getting the game to perform with that amount of content is… not trivial. Game engines are typically optimised for so-called static content - objects that the developers are placing into levels, which get packaged into the data files that ship with the game. What Pax Dei does is completely the opposite, where the community is allowed to author huge amounts of dynamic content - the building pieces that are placed into the valleys in real time, with each valley being built in a unique fashion.

Having this perform well on a typical gaming PC - with MMO networking - is an amazingly hard challenge. We’ve historically added multiple layers of optimisation to the game to address building performance, ranging from instanced mesh arrays to advanced clustering of building content to optimise rendering datasets.

This release introduces a new advanced physics streaming solution for buildings, enabling much better performance in densely built valleys than before. The change has enabled us to significantly adjust the streaming distance settings. In our testing, we’re able to achieve higher frame rates than before and see buildings at much greater distances.

New Graphics presets

Important note: This is not in the build that will be deployed tomorrow, but will be added in an upcoming patch for this content update.

In addition to the building system optimisation, we’ve been working on revamping the renderer configuration to give you a better choice between the visual quality of the game vs pure render performance for higher frame rates.

As a side note, the Unreal rendering tech we’re using is quite intense on both the CPU and the GPU of the PC you’re playing the game on. In our testing, especially on older PCs, the game's performance bottleneck has often been the CPU. The building system optimisations in this release free up CPU for physics, shifting more to rendering, which will help on computers that have been CPU-constrained in the past.

We’ve tuned and expanded the graphics quality presets from the current three (Low, Medium, High) to five (Low, Medium, High, Epic, and Cinematic). In the new system, the old Low roughly corresponds to the new Medium, the old Medium is the new High, and the old High is the new Epic. We’ve also added an automated GPU speed checker to the game, which will run once on every computer to set graphics settings to values that should provide a good gameplay experience.

The goal with these changes is to make the game perform better on slower PC, but also give even more visual goodies on the latest generation CPUs and GPUs if you so choose - or for those who care about pure frame rate performance, it’ll be easier to pick presets that give you that.

Scalable UI

Scalable UI is back with “small/medium/large” options that can be adjusted in the settings menu. Issues and bugs from the previous system have been fixed.

Improved Material Recovery on Failed Crafts

We have introduced a new system that determines which materials are returned when a crafting attempt fails. This system is designed to make crafting failures feel fairer and better reflect the investment made into a recipe.

Instead of relying on flat randomness, material recovery now considers the relative value of the ingredients used in the recipe.

How the System Works

Each ingredient in a recipe now has an internal value that reflects the effort and rarity required to obtain it. When a craft fails, the system evaluates the recipe's total value and determines how much of that value should be recovered.

Materials are then returned from the original recipe until the recovery target is reached.

The items returned are chosen randomly, but the probability of recovering each item is weighted by its value. This means more valuable ingredients are significantly more likely to be recovered than common bulk materials.

Because items are returned individually and probabilities are recalculated after each item, it is possible for a single valuable component to push the recovered value beyond the target.

Early Crafting Protection

To make early crafting experimentation less punishing, low-tier recipes now return a much larger portion of their materials when a craft fails.

This helps new players learn crafting systems without being heavily penalized for early mistakes.

As recipes increase in tier, the baseline recovery ratio gradually decreases, moving closer to the intended balance for higher value crafting.

Future Crafting Progression

The material recovery system is designed to support future progression systems.

In a later update, players will be able to increase the recovery ratio through gameplay systems, including things like: Advanced crafting facilities, new Miracles, Crafting specializations or Equipment. These systems will allow experienced crafters to reduce risk and better protect valuable materials.

Crafting Experience

Failed crafting attempts still grant crafting experience.

However, experience is only awarded based on the materials that were actually consumed during the attempt. Materials returned through the recovery system do not contribute to crafting XP.

This ensures that crafting failures still contribute to normal progression while preventing situations where repeatedly failing expensive crafts could generate excessive experience.

Community Feedback

Thank you to everyone who participated in the discussion and provided thoughtful feedback while this system was being developed. Your input helped shape several aspects of the implementation and the long-term direction of crafting. If you're interested in the full discussion, you can read the feedback thread in the Feedback section on our Discord: InDev - Feedback on failed crafting return system

Equipment Visibility on Characters

Sheathable Weapons

Equipped weapons are now visibly sheathed on your character when not in use.

The weapon that appears sheathed is the last weapon you used, and will be displayed on your character’s back or hip, depending on the weapon type. This allows other players to see what you are carrying even when it is not drawn.

If you prefer a cleaner look, you can hide sheathed weapons from the Character Panel → Equipment view.

Hide Helmet Option

A Hide Helmet option has been added to the Character Panel → Equipment view, allowing players to hide their equipped helmet visually while still keeping its stats and benefits.

Helmets will always be visible while a player is PvP flagged, regardless of this setting.

This PvP exception will not be active in the initial PTS release, but will be added during PTS before the feature goes live.

Bow Improvements

We have made several improvements and fixes to the baseline bow responsiveness and usability, as part of ongoing work on ranged combat and in preparation for the upcoming fletching revamp.

Gameplay Changes

• Ambush invisibility now ends when the arrow is fired.
• Bow combat should now feel more responsive. If you hold LMB while drawing a new arrow after firing the previous one, your character will seamlessly transition into aiming and shooting once the draw is complete. You can still cancel before the aim circle appears.
• Bow skill XP is now awarded when the NPC is killed, as long as the player has hit the target with a bow at least once during the fight.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where an equipped bow would display a nocked arrow even when no arrows were left in the inventory.
• Fixed an issue where canceling a bow draw could incorrectly trigger the "Out of Arrows" message.

Crafting UI

If a recipe yields byproducts, they will now be indicated in the recipe (making some Meat Chunks from a deer carcass also yields bone fragments and suet).

Art & Visuals

We added back some stronger colors in the grass flowers (mainly in the Grassland biome). We overdid it a bit in the last update while trying to improve resource readability, which made some parts of the world look a bit too washed out. Thanks to our players for pointing this out!. It’s not exactly the same as it was before, but fairly close.

As usual, we’re looking forward to your constructive feedback and bug/issue reports in the dedicated channel once the update is available for testing.

Pax vobiscum,
The Mainframe Team