Alenir Idle v0.4.3 Devlog: Crafted Gear & Clarity

Welcome to v0.4.3, the Crafted Gear & Clarity update.

This release does three things. It makes crafting the strongest way to get gear. It brings the drop rate and double drop bonuses back to a size where reaching the cap takes real effort. And it answers a long list of small things you told us in the Astral Tavern: confusing stacks, a log that was hard to read, a setting that did nothing, and a few things that were simply missing.

Nobody loses a level, an item, an achievement or a prestige point in this update. Everything below applies to what you earn from now on.

1. Crafting Pays Off

Until now a Rare sword you found and a Rare sword you crafted rolled exactly the same bonuses. That made crafting a convenience, not a reason.

Crafted gear and skill cards roll the full range of their rarity. The same rarity found as a drop rolls at 75 percent of those values. The number of bonuses and the stats that can roll are the same for both.
An example. A Rare weapon can roll Attack Power from 7 to 29 when crafted, and from 5 to 22 when found.
A "Crafted" label shows in the item details, the inventory panel and the list view, so you can tell them apart at a glance.
Items already in your bag keep what they rolled. Only new drops use the found range.
Food and potions are unchanged. Monsters drop almost none, and crafted food and potions already roll their rarity from the recipe.

The new Rarity tab in the Codex

Open Codex > Rarity to see what every rarity rolls: how many bonuses, how much the values are multiplied, which part of the range is cut, and the crafted and found range for the stat you choose (Attack Power, Crit Chance, Max HP, Luck or Drop Rate). The numbers come straight from the tables the game rolls with, so the tab follows every future change.

2. Rewards Rebalance

Over several updates, drop rate and double drop (and double craft) picked up many sources: Luck, specializations, mastery, skill synergies, skill cards, achievements, bloodlines and more. We measured the heroes in the realm and found that the top of the range was already reached by a visible share of crafting and gathering skills, long before most of those sources were even in use (very few heroes have a specialization yet). Once the cap is reached, every extra source stops mattering, and prestige would have had nothing left to add.

So the sources now take more effort to stack. The cap is the same for everyone, free or paying, and nothing was taken from your levels or items.

Source	Before	Now
Skill specialization drop and double bonuses	full	a quarter
Skill synergy drop and double bonuses	full	a quarter
Mastery double chance per level	0.25%	0.15%
Gathering mastery double drop at level 99	+10%	+5%
Passive skill card drop rate and double drop	grows with card level	fixed, does not grow
Achievement drop rate and double drop bonuses	2/3 of the listed value	1/3
Luck crit damage	0.5% per point	0.2% per point
Apex Hunter's Blood (bloodline)	+20% drop, +15% double	+15% drop, +10% double

Skill cards are made for combat first, so only their combat stats keep growing with the card level.

Prestige now has something to offer

Fortune's Favor has a third rank, +6% drop rate per rank.
Lucky Hands (new): +3% double drop per rank, three ranks.
Twin Forge (new): +3% double craft per rank, three ranks.

What this does to the numbers

On the saved heroes we looked at, the share of crafting skills sitting at the cap went from 17 percent to 0, and from 11 to 4 percent for gathering. The loot multiplier of a typical combat hero barely moved, and a strong one (the top tenth) went from about 1.67 to 1.53. In other words: most of this lands on veterans who have built up several of these sources, and almost none of it on new heroes.

What we did not touch

Gold and EXP gains, the offline cap and the offline cap perks are unchanged. There is no refund or compensation, because nothing you own was reduced.

3. Show Your Items in Chat

A suggestion from the Tavern: show off an item.

Open an item in your inventory, choose Show in chat, and pick World, Trade or Help.
It appears as a chip like [Iron Sword +3] in the colour of its rarity. Tap it to see the item with its bonuses.
A shown item is only a look. It does not prove you own it, and it never moves or reserves the item. Real trading still happens in the Marketplace and in direct offers.
Players on an older version see the plain text of the chip.

4. Titles

Titles stay earned. Before, many titles were checked against your current level or counters, so a Prestige or an Ascension could take them away (and unequip the one you wore). Now every title you have earned is remembered, including the ones you earned before this update.
Twelve new titles: Forge Apprentice, the Craftsman, Industrial Titan, Grand Artificer, Master of One, the Specialist, World Traveler, Eternal Warrior, God of War, the Gilded, Giant's Blow and the Archivist.
Hidden titles. Some titles do not appear in any list until you earn them. The Codex only tells you how many are still out there. We are not going to tell you what they are.

5. Clearer Items and Logs

Stacks say their rarity. The same food in different rarities has always been separate stacks (a Rare heals more than a Common), but they looked identical. Stacks above Common now show their rarity, stacks of one item sit next to each other when you sort, and crafting uses the lowest rarity first, so your best stack is kept.
The Market sell page shows the real rarity of each stack (it used to show every stack as Common), and food tooltips show the buff you will actually get from that rarity.
The activity log says what dropped.
```
x6 (x2!)
```
is now
```
x6 (3 + 3 bonus)
```
, with the rarity spelled out and plain words for the rest ("pity drop", "materials kept").

6. Fixes

Materials you locked to protect them from selling were shown as 0 in the Creation ingredient list, although crafting could use them. They now count, with a small lock icon.
The Creation page remembers whether you use the list or the card view.
Settings > Show Combat Log did nothing. It now hides the combat log on the Combat page and in dungeons.

7. Please Update

Version 0.4.3 is now the minimum version. If you are on an older version you will see an update prompt, and cloud sync and Hall of Fame submissions are paused until you update. You can still play, and nothing is lost: update from Google Play, or reload the web version, and everything continues where you left off.

8. Thank You

Thank you to everyone in the Astral Tavern, Discord and world chat who sent in reports and ideas: the stacks that looked the same, the log that was hard to read, the request to show items in chat, and the questions about drop rates that pushed us to look at the numbers properly. A few of those reports came with screenshots and videos, and that made the difference.

Go and craft something good.