Skip to main content
← Back to Release Notes

v1.29: Mount Up

Mount Up. Two threads run through this patch. The first is mounts as a real progression axis: your Riding skill now controls how many mounts you can equip and deploy in a single battle, mount passive skills improve at every star-up level (not just the milestone tiers), and Nibbles can finally be star-upped alongside the rest of the roster. The second is a chat layer that talks back: Chat Announcements broadcast the things worth broadcasting (equipment merges, milestones), flag emojis are supported, and guild chat now has a notification badge that auto-opens the panel when guildmates are saying something. Underneath, a Chapter 1 and 2 audit sands the first hour of the game, Bogmaw joins the Chapter 1 lineup, and a small batch of VFX and UI polish lands across the rest of the game.

📣 Update since this patch: Two new Guild Raid floors (Raid XXI: Sealed Grove + Raid XXII: Storm Veil) and a redesigned Raid scoring system have landed since v1.29 shipped. The new scoring pays partial credit for deep pushes and adds a grade-scaled clean-win bonus on top. Read the v1.29 addendum.

At a Glance

🐕✨ Feature Updates 🐕✨

🐞 Bug Fixes 🐞

  • Locked equipment on the equip screen is no longer dimmed. The full inventory now reads at a glance, locked or not.
  • Defeat animations now play consistently across all enemies, and defeated enemies no longer linger on screen at zero HP.
  • Guild Raid 20x rewards screen now shows the correct rarity items.
  • Cryomancer Specialization now displays correctly in Adventure logs.
  • Targeting-on-enemy skill bugs have been resolved.
  • Character switching no longer leaves visuals in a bad state.
  • Guild chat gesture emojis with skin tones render correctly.
  • Hero's Path reward amounts are no longer blurry.

🐾 Known Issues 🐾

  • The Friends screen may not load up after tapping on the icon.
  • Debug text may appear in Global Chat announcements after merging equipment to a new rarity.
  • The last Tower Challenge level may show a disabled ticket button.
  • Guild invite links may direct players to the App Store instead of the game.
  • The Rewards pop-up may not close when tapping anywhere on the screen.
  • The Stats screen in the Monster Hunt Expertise menu may appear blank.
  • Menu button text may appear small in some non-English languages.

Designer Deep Dive

Two threads in this patch. The first is mounts as a real progression axis: equipping more than one in a fight, every star upgrading the passive, and Nibbles entering the star-up roster. The second is a chat layer that talks back: announcements, flags, and a guild experience that tells you when guildmates are saying something. Around those, an early-game polish pass sands the first hour of the game and Bogmaw joins Chapter 1. Skip to a section by tapping any link in the summary above.

Multiple Mounts in Battle

For most of the game's life, your mount has been a one-at-a-time decision: pick the rider, ride into the fight, hope you picked the right one. The plumbing for multi-mount deployment has been in the simulation layer for a while; the player surface has not been. v1.29 connects the two. Your Riding skill now decides how many mounts you can equip and deploy in a single battle. A new player rides one. A long-tenured player with a high Riding skill rides a whole queue: lead mount on the field, the rest waiting their turn, and the passive skills of every mount in the queue stay active as long as one of them is still alive. Order matters now.

How it works

  • Riding skill drives mount count. As your Riding skill levels up, the cap on mounts you can equip and deploy in a single battle rises with it.
  • One mount on the field, the rest queued. Your lead mount rides into combat; when it falls, the next mount in your queue takes its place. The fight only ends for your mount line when the last one in the queue goes down.
  • Passives stack while any mount is alive. As long as at least one of your queued mounts is still up, the passive skills of every mount in your queue are active on you. The stack only thins as the mounts in the queue actually die.

Why deployment order matters

  • Pick a lead, then a backline. Your lead mount is the one taking the hits, so durability and front-line presence matter more for that slot. Your backline mounts are mostly there for their passives, so optimize those slots for the buffs you want active longest.
  • Order is a real lever. A glass-cannon mount in the lead burns out fast and drops its passive early; the same mount in the back keeps contributing for the whole fight. The reverse is true for tanky mounts: a brick in front holds your passive stack alive longer than a brick parked at the back.
  • The Riding skill is now load-bearing. It used to sit at the back of the progression list; it's now a gate on a major combat axis. Higher Riding means more mounts in the queue, which means a longer-lived passive stack and more room for strategic ordering.

Mount Star-Ups: Every Star Now Counts

Star-ups on mounts used to feel like checkpoints. Most stars gave you a stat bump and not much else; only the milestone tiers improved how the mount actually fought. That made the in-between stars feel like grinding for the next milestone, instead of progress in their own right. We've reworked the curve so every star-up improves the mount's passive skill in a way you can read at the table.

Per-star passive improvements

  • Mount passive skills now improve at every star-up level, not only the milestone tiers. Each star you spend has a visible effect on how the mount behaves in battle.
  • Headline passives (the ones that previously upgraded only at major tiers) have been redistributed across the curve so the early stars do something interesting too.
  • Total power at max stars is unchanged. This is a redistribution of the power budget across the star-up curve, not an inflation of the ceiling.

Nibbles joins the star-up roster

  • Nibbles can now be star-upped. The cheekiest one in the lineup was the only mount left out of the star-up system; that gap is closed.
  • All Nibbles' star-up tiers follow the new every-star-counts pattern from day one.

Chat Announcements

Some moments in your game are worth telling other people about. Merging an equipment piece to a new rarity. Hitting a milestone. Things that used to live as a quiet popup on your screen and then evaporate. Chat Announcements lift those moments into chat as a shared event. Your guildmates see the merge land. The lobby reads the milestone tick over. The game's good moments stop being lonely.

  • Important game events now post into chat as announcements. Equipment merges to a new rarity, milestone reaches, and similar moments are surfaced in the chat surface they belong in.
  • Distinct from regular chat messages in styling, so they don't drown out player conversation.
  • Localized, like the rest of our chat surfaces. A milestone announced in Spanish reads in English for an English reader.

On the known-issue side: we know debug text can leak into Global Chat announcements after a rarity merge in some flows. The fix is in flight; the announcement system itself is live.

Guild Chat Quality of Life

The chat surfaces have been growing in importance for a few patches running. Global Chat shipped in v1.28; Chat Announcements ship now. The connective tissue around them needs to keep pace, so v1.29 lands a couple of small-but-meaningful upgrades to the social layer.

Notification badge & auto-open

  • Guild chat now shows a notification badge when there's something new to read.
  • The guild chat panel auto-opens when a fresh message arrives, so you stop missing the conversation while you're heads-down on a run.

Flag emojis

  • Country flag emojis are now supported in every chat surface. They render correctly inline, alongside the rest of your message.
  • This pairs with the live-translation work from previous chat patches: a flag-tagged message reads natively no matter which language you're typing in.

Early Game Polish

We've been adding to the top of the mountain for a few patches: chapters 101 through 120, tower 201 through 220, multi-mount, mature progression. The bottom of the mountain hasn't seen the same attention in a while, and the early game is the part of the experience every brand-new player walks through. v1.29 spends a real polish budget on Chapters 1 and 2 so the first hour of the game feels as deliberate as the hundredth.

Chapter 1 and 2 audit

  • Story beats and skill descriptions across Chapters 1 and 2 have been audited and reworked. Confusing text is clearer. Dead lines are cut. The narrative reads cleanly from the cold-start hello to the first real difficulty curve.
  • The aim is smoother onboarding without dumbing down the actual mechanics. A new player should leave Chapter 2 with the right mental model, not a watered-down one.

Bogmaw joins Chapter 1

  • Bogmaw, a new enemy, makes its debut in Chapter 1. The early-game lineup gets a new face (and a new shell) to fight against.
  • Part of the same audit pass: the early chapters had a thinner enemy roster than the later chapters, and Bogmaw starts closing that gap.

Visual & UI Polish

Two small art and UI touches that round out the patch.

  • More VFX across the Expertise flow. Leveling up an Expertise now has additional visual flourish, so the milestone reads as a milestone instead of a quiet number tick.
  • Downgrade equipment icon updated. The icon is clearer about what action it represents, so the wrong tap stops happening as often.

How We Balance Now

Carrying this section forward each release because it's an evergreen explanation of how patches like this come together. Rigorous testing and player telemetry, with the community in the loop.

  • Thousands of test runs per change. Before the new mount-passive curve shipped, we put real loadouts through real chapters with the new and old curves and read the distributions, not single data points: median run, worst-case run, runaway tail. The redistribution of the power budget across the star-up curve was tuned against those reads.
  • Telemetry on real player choices. Multi-mount deployment is the kind of system that only proves itself in live data: which combinations players actually pick, which combinations win, which combinations get assembled and immediately torn apart. We're watching all of it.
  • Days, not months. The Chapter 1 and 2 audit moved from triage to fix to verify inside this patch's cycle.
  • Thank you. Multi-mount has been a community ask for a long stretch; the per-star mount-passive rework was driven by feedback that mid-tier stars felt like checkpoints; the early-game polish pass came directly out of new-player observation work the community helped us prioritize. You break the game in creative ways. You find the seams. You report the weird stuff. Please keep doing it. The loop only works because you're in it.
← v1.28v1.29 →