Patch Notes: July 2025

July 29th, 2025

Source: Steam News - Embers Adrift - July 29th; Improvement Smorgasbord

This month introduces a slew of improvements, QoL updates, and a new performance branch (IL2CPP) for further testing.

Fixes

• Fixed issues with resources that were spawning under water.
• Fixed item category on Mangrove Logs.
• Fixed Radiant Flux crafted weapons not showing their updated visuals.
• Fixed Cooked Tough Meat recipe output.
• Fixed an issue that allowed some ranged NPC abilities to be parried and riposted by players.
• Fixed characters not being clickable on character selection.
• Fixed tooltip typo in high resolution sun shadows option.
• Fixed macro edit dialog text not wrapping.
• Fixed visual issue with the Log UI when opening/closing the window with the hunting log selected.
• Fixed an issue with macOS performance when "None" was selected for the framerate limiter.
• Fixed lights disabling in the Shaper hallway.
• Fixed an issue that was causing overhead chat bubble text to be faded.
• Fixed a spelling error on level 50 dropped tar flasks.

Improvements

• Adjusted LOD on a number of weapons.
• Adjusted LOD on all Ember Ring vegetation.
• Doubled the AFK boot timer for active subscribers.
• Increased the number of bears that spawn for Hallick's Tower quest.
• Rotated seasonal wares on Marta.
• Updated the entrance to Freehold to be more solo-friendly.
• NPCs:
  • Reduced the damage over time component on Ashen Boar's Impale ability.
  • Reduced rate that NPCs can use the Patch ability.
  • Redmane Stalkers should no longer attack boars.
• Bulletin Board Tasks:
  • Allow Flooded Ruins Crocodiles and Rats to be counted for the Redshore tasks.
  • Reduced Elk count for Grimstone Canyon task. Included general animal killing as part of the task.
• Camera:
  • Allow left mouse to rotate the camera without rotating the player in over-the-shoulder camera mode.
  • Adjusted upper camera orbit to be equidistant from the center and lower orbits so that a fixed zoom maintains the same distance for the character in 3rd person camera mode.
• UI:
  • We have spruced up our loading screens by including various renders of our custom creatures & props that correspond to the region you are currently loading.
  • Added title to the offensive UI-space nameplate.
  • Added "Use Alternate Difficulty Colors" toggle to the interface options to replace the Yellow/Orange/Red difficulty colors with Gold/Red-Orange/Purple.
  • Added a "Type" dropdown to the Auction House which allows you to filter by different types (weapon types, armor types, jewelry, etc).
  • Added "Type" to the sort menu in the Auction House which sorts by the above types.
  • Auctions that have bids can no longer be cancelled.
  • Improved the error wording when your client cannot contact Steam.
  • Ability UI elements now properly use Alchemy execution and targeting parameters when Alchemy is toggled on.
  • Changed "Sale Price" to "Sell Price" on item tooltips at the merchant.
  • Max craft count increased from 99 to 999.
• Overhead Combat Text:
  • Now scales with distance to the camera. This should make it easier to see for ranged attacks.
  • Now properly renders with dynamic resolution modes.
• Ibaxus:
  • Improved notification of mobs calling allies from great distances.
  • Increased delay for certain mobs calling allies from great distances.
  • Increased variability in Stalker respawns.
  • Enforced stricter reset distances for some mobs.
  • Adjusted a number of nav links around the lake to reduce mobs from climbing the rocks.
  • Archibald no longer accepts money from your bank.
  • Shards no longer ask for confirmation during Need/Greed loot rolls.
  • With the recent slew of activity in Ibaxus the path from the Ember Ring to the valley has become well travelled.
• Renamed a few reagents to reserve the "Potent" adjective for the highest level reagent item category:
  • Potent Venom -> Strong Venom
  • Potent Ichor -> Concentrated Ichor
  • Potent Salve -> Soothing Salve
  • Potent Tincture -> Concentrated Tincture
• MacOS builds are no longer universal binaries and will only work on Apple Silicon.
• Reduced the default max shadow casting lights option to 2 (performance optimization).

Optimizations

Engine and Shader Updates

This patch includes a Unity Engine update to the latest subversion. This brings some small performance improvements and bug fixes. In addition, all vegetation and custom shaders have been updated which should also yield some minor performance gains.

Terrain Rendering Optimizations

This month we are adding new culling tech to overland scenes. Most zones are composed of 4 large terrains in a 2x2 configuration. Each individual terrain has a performance setting that was previously set to a fixed number. With this patch we are now dynamically adjusting this value based on your distance to each individual terrain - which should provide a small break to your GPU.

In addition, we have enabled stochastic texture sampling in terrain shaders for all outdoor zones. This rendering technique should reduce the frequency of repeated texture patterns.

Application Startup Optimizations

The last few patches have ballooned our application load times to an unacceptable level. On application start we are pre-loading a lot of data which can cause the client to show as "not responding". To mitigate this issue we have deferred some loading until the first loading screen is shown. This means that your first "zone in" after application startup may take slightly longer than it did previously, but subsequent zone loads will be quicker.

UI Performance Optimizations

During a deep dive into performance of the game we identified an issue with how our UI windows interact with Unity's backend UGUI system.

Previously, all hidden windows have an alpha value of 0 and are not raycasted against, which means that they cannot be seen or interacted with. When a window is shown, we transition the alpha from 0->1 for a fade in, and enable raycasting for interactions. As it turns out, even though a UI element is not being rendered or raycasted against we were still paying a performance overhead in UGUI to keep them registered and available.

This patch changes how we handle hidden windows within our UI system. Once hidden, a window's game object is now completely disabled which removes them from the UGUI system entirely. The downside to this, is that there is a slight performance hit for disabling and enabling objects (which is why we did not do it previously). However, this performance hit only lasts a single frame on open/close rather than us paying for having it registered with UGUI on every frame.

We have done a fair bit of internal testing and everything appears to work as usual. In theory this change should not even be noticed - outside of the performance improvement. On average I was saving upwards of 4ms per frame which isn't a giant leap forward, but it just may be enough to make a difference for you.

IL2CPP Branch

To further improve performance, we have built an alternate client using Unity's IL2CPP build process, which converts the game into a native binary. In theory, this should provide significant performance gains. In practice, however, the results can vary considerably depending on several factors - most notably vegetation and point light shadows.

Earlier this month we deployed a QA build using this tech but did not get enough feedback for us to make a call on if we should move forward with this tech as the primary build. We would ask that you try playing with the alternate IL2CPP build this month and report any issues you might encounter. If something game breaking comes up you can always swap back to the default branch.

To swap to this branch right click on Embers Adrift in your Steam library and select "Properties":

Steam library Properties menu for IL2CPP branch selection

Next select "Betas" in the left hand column and you should see a menu on the right named "Beta Participation". In this dropdown you should see an entry called "live_il2cpp - experimental IL2CPP builds" - select this and you are good to go!

Steam Betas menu with IL2CPP branch option

To swap back to non-IL2CPP builds simply change this dropdown to "None". And just to reiterate - our goal is to make the default IL2CPP so any and all feedback you can provide on these builds would be extremely helpful.