Hello Paxians,

The wait will soon be over! We are thrilled to announce that the next content update for Pax Dei, Verse 2: Market Square, will launch on December 13.

Note: Maintenance will begin at 9 am UTC and is expected to last approximately 2 hours, so please plan accordingly. Also, no wipe of the world or characters is planned for the Verse 2 update.

As the name suggests, Market Square will introduce a dynamic market and gold economy system. And that’s just the beginning, here’s a detailed look at what you’ll find in this update:

Verse 2 will introduce gold coins, which will serve as the universal currency for trade. You will earn gold coins as loot from NPCs and can use them to buy items from other players via a new type of crafter, the market stall. You will be able to set up bustling trade hubs, explore markets owned by other players, and utilize quick filtering to navigate them with ease. Additionally, you will have customizable trading permissions, allowing you to tailor your experience to fit your community or clan.
More details here[playpaxdei.com]

Important note: To ensure that you can start experimenting with the economy right away, we’ve decided to split this update into two phases. Gold and market stalls will be available in December, but the Grace feature will be introduced only early next year - probably in January (still needs to be confirmed), as it requires a bit more development time.

We are bringing Pax Dei to our French and German communities, allowing you to play the game in your own language. As you know, localization can be a meticulous process, and while we work hard to ensure accuracy, some phrasing might not feel quite right at first. We will welcome your feedback and we’re ready to brainstorm and refine terms with you in the dedicated feedback threads that will open on December 13 on Discord. Get your dictionaries and brains ready!

In Market Square, we will be making some adjustments to combat. For example, we will be adjusting weapon balance: mace and spear damage will be reduced, sword damage will be increased, and the axe’s special attack will apply a 20% armor reduction effect. We will also adjust stamina costs for PvE blocking and introduce a new restriction for the “Unstuck” feature, which will require full stamina and will not be usable during combat. Additionally, we will improve targeting logic for melee combat to prioritize nearby enemies. Forward movement and the area effects of certain attacks will be slightly reduced. Finally, we will fix some issues, such as spell cooldown interactions, NPC pathing exploits, and targeting bugs to ensure smoother gameplay.

We will be making visual improvements to enhance resource visibility and quality. For example, the size of Skullcap plants will be increased, and models and icons for Reeds, Oaths, Wheat and Barley will be updated. The visual appearance of Petra Dei in the world will be significantly improved, and missing or outdated resource icons will also be added or refreshed for a more seamless experience.

Character customization will receive some nice updates! You will be able to choose your beard and mustache options separately, giving you more control over your character’s appearance. We will also make additional tweaks, such as improvements to cape clipping, adjustments to metallic brightness in shaders, and better texture consistency for leather armor. Normal maps and body shape logic will also be refined to provide a more polished experience overall.

To ensure a smoother gameplay experience, we will adjust the Skinning skill to guarantee proper XP gain. Additionally, we will streamline recipe names and inventory interactions for clarity and usability. We will also fix some issues, such as inventory stacking prompts, item drops during inventory transfers, and map focus problems. Alchemy table visual effects and resource spawn positions will also be refined to enhance your crafting experience.

With this update, you will be able to filter visible chat lobbies through a new settings menu in the general chat. Discord account names will no longer appear beneath your character names in chat, but they will remain accessible via the interaction menu. Additional updates to the UI are also being made.

We hope you’re as excited as we are, and that you’re ready to earn gold and go on a shopping spree starting December 13!

And for those of you who read thoroughly, we can confirm that another content update is already in the works for early next year. Stay tuned for more details.

Pax vobiscum,
The Mainframe Team

Friday’s announcement regarding markets and economy triggered many questions from the community. We’ll try to answer as many of these in as much detail as we can below.

When it comes to timing, our rule of thumb is ”it will be deployed when ready.” For markets, we can tell you that we are super ready - like, super super ready!


That won’t be possible in this first pass of the markets. We have been looking at visual customisation of the markets for later updates, as we know being able to customize the stalls is important. So - we don’t have an ETA for customization, but it’s on the list.


Yes, we have visual variants coming in a later update - no ETA yet. You can see below some Work in Progress designs. Here is what you’ll be able to sell/buy on the specific stalls:

• Alchemist: herbs, mushrooms, minerals, drinks and potions.
  
• Woodsman: leather, leather armor, hides, bow, fur, meat.
  
• Crafter: ores, metals, metal armor, tailoring.

In development - Stall variants

In development - Alchemist Stall


There won’t be one initially. In a later version we’re going to surface market areas on the map.


In this first version of the market stalls, you will have to be at the market stall to see what is being sold in the stall. We will be updating the system so you can browse the contents of the stalls at a greater distance (i.e. within a Heartland). When browsing remote stalls within the Heartland, if you find wares you’d like to buy, the market UI will let you set a map waypoint to the stall to make it easier to visit.


The maximum amount of gold a player can own is a Very Large Number, which we intend no player to ever reach.


Not in this version of the Markets. We have later plans for market logs that give you essential information on your active orders and all your order activity. We’ve also discussed making it so that players who have connected their Discord accounts could ask the game to notify them using a DM when they make a sale.


The market stalls will have their own inventory, and items listed for sale will go into the stall’s inventory. Note that there will be a fee to list an item for sale, which is set at 5% of the item sale price and a minimum of 1 gold, so the stalls will not be great for storing items in place of chests. We intend to observe how this fee works out and might adjust the fee in the future.


Currently, you will not be able to deconstruct a market stall if it contains an item for sale. You’ll have to delist all the items before you can deconstruct the market stall.


The stall owner and the plot owner will be able to de-list items from the stalls they control, assuming they’ve given other people the right to list items in their market. The player who de-lists an item takes the item to their inventory. Therefore, the first version of the Market Stalls is optimized for players and their trusted allies to sell their wares to the public as opposed to running a market where everyone comes to sell their items.

For the first version of Market Stalls, you will be able to share permissions with your clan to post items for sale, and anyone can buy from any stall. In the future, we’re going to make it safe to list items in a public stall without the fear of the stall owner “stealing” your item by de-listing it. We’d also like to let you limit who can buy from the stall, so you could set up a stall with discounted item prices for your clan, for example.


The existing sales will continue to exist and will not be affected by the permission change.


Currently, there is no time limit for how long the items on sale are listed.


In this first version of the markets you will only be able to sell items. We already have the design for adding buy orders, and we want to include that feature in a future update.


We currently allow all items to be listed regardless of their condition. As a buyer, you will be able to see the condition of the item being sold.


Initially, each stall will be set to a cap of 120 orders. This is likely to evolve in the future.


Until further notice, all gold coins will come in the form of PvE loot.


We have plans for this, but no details to share yet.


You will earn a certain amount per day for free and then you can gain incrementally more on a daily basis by sacrificing gold at an increasing cost. The cost gets reset on a daily basis. Grace is a non-transferable resource.


We will share more about the locations later. The amount of Grace you can earn to perform all miracles is limited by time and how much gold you’re prepared to invest in it, which influences how much you’re willing to use for fast travel. We’re also looking into increasing the cost of fast travel miracles based on the amount and value of goods you’re carrying, making these miracles great to go out on adventure but not necessarily the best options to bring the goods home or transport them over long distances.


We sympathize with this sentiment. The reason we’re planning to use this mechanic here is not inspired by evil and manipulative industry standards, but because we think it's the best fit for the design goals we’re trying to achieve with Grace. Grace will be a hugely valuable resource that we want to be throttled by both time and in-game wealth and success (gold and social positions). We’ll share more details on Grace, Miracles and the Divine at a later point.

Pax vobiscum,
The Mainframe Team