Hello Paxians,

We wanted to share with you some work in progress our team is doing regarding icons and UI in general. 

We’re excited to share that our team is working on an update for the item icons! We know that the recently added icons haven’t been as clear as we’d like, which can sometimes cause confusion. That’s why we’re introducing a more visually intuitive system, making it easier to instantly recognize both the quality level and tier of an item at a glance.

The concept below is still a work in progress, but the final result should look quite similar. Bonus: you’ll also catch a sneak peek at the Mastercrafting system mentioned in Tuesday’s news and interview.

UI Update

Our UI team is also hard at work on unifying the game’s interface. In short, our focal points are essentially to make your experience more consistent, making sure the UI doesn’t get in the way anymore, and allowing our UI’s to be more predictable and scalable.

To actually show you, instead of writing promising words that might feel empty, we’ve included a bunch of images. Keep in mind though, that these images are a work in progress outline for the design, and their looks will be updated to fit in better stylistically with the medieval setting of Pax Dei.

We’re aiming to make our in-game main menus, like our Inventory, Crafting menu, Character menu (currently equipment), Clan Menu, Markets, and Grace, follow the standard of our latest Journal update. So we’re gradually moving to a more docked panel on the right side of the screen, moving the UI more out of the way so you can focus on the world of Pax Dei and its gameplay. Identical to the latest Journal update, we’re also moving the details of the focused item into a floating tooltip. Aside from these bigger, more visually apparent changes, we’re also updating all of the keybind inputs along the way to make sure that the UI of the menus no longer conflict with the inputs that you need for combat and other gameplay-related features.

We don’t have an exact ETA for these improvements, as the revamp requires us to rebuild quite a bit of previously built systems. We know you’ve been waiting, and we are working hard with our small team to get these improvements in as fast as possible for you. Because of this, we are aiming to roll these updates out in chunks, so you’ll get to enjoy updates more frequently.
We’re excited about making Pax Dei better, and we’re looking forward to getting these updates in, we wanted to give you a glimpse of what’s coming to share that excitement with you.

Pax vobiscum,
The Mainframe Team

Miscellaneous

• Fixed an issue where the inventory hotbar would disappear in some dungeons.

• Fixed an issue where flowerpots would become impossible to destroy

• Fixed an issue where Plot Map was showing incorrect map in other provinces

• Fixed an issue about missing ingredients in Journal

• Fixed an issue where cancelling a sales order would not return the item to the redeeming queue of the player, if the market stall was owned by another player.

• All Plots owned by characters in specific Region are now shown to the player.

• Fixed snap-point selection for small objects.

• Fixed an issue where placing a sale order for a recently split stack fails silently.

• Fixed an issue where debug names were displayed in Construction Hammer menu.

• Added profanity filtering for Plot names.

• Added a background to the Construction Hammer keybinds for added readability.

Hello Paxians,

We recently celebrated one year of early access for Pax Dei and wanted to provide an update on where we come from, where we’re at, and what’s coming.

Pax Dei has been long in the coming. The idea for the game started brewing in the minds of a few of the Mainframe founders 20 years ago. The core of the game was clear already back then: making an open sandbox world inspired by medieval myths, driven by players in a fully open economy. The first challenge was that what didn’t exist back then was a game engine capable of running the game as envisioned, with visuals grounded in the real world but made larger than life, so one would yearn to live in the world of Pax Dei with a sense of wonder. The second challenge for MMOs has historically been the server-side capabilities needed to run a game with thousands of players. The requirements of MMOs are enormous compared to other games, and the game as envisioned just would not have been possible 20 years ago.

In 2019, we decided it was time and founded a company to make the game real. What had changed was that the Unreal Engine render engine was now very mature and could cater for the style of visuals we wanted, and server compute & Internet bandwidth was now on a level that could be used to run the game. As with most game projects, it took about a year to get a team together, so the preproduction effort for Pax Dei began in earnest in 2020, with us working on designs and developing technical solutions to drive the MMO backend needed on top of Unreal. Another piece of technology we put a significant emphasis on was the world generation pipeline, to enable our relatively small world team to build a game world hundreds of square kilometers in size.

With the player community being the core of the game - all the really interesting things in Pax Dei are intended to be a result of emergent player actions - we started to hit a point in 2023 where developing the game was becoming hard without having the players deeply involved. The Mainframe team has quite a few people who have both worked on MMOs and played them extensively, and we’re very firmly in the camp that believes the player community is what makes MMOs interesting. That, in turn, means we believe developing the game without involving the players from early stages of development won’t result in the best possible MMO, so we wanted to get people on board even knowing the game wasn’t “done” yet, which, in many ways, MMOs never are. As communities form in a game, they shape the game through interaction with the developer, feeding a cycle of adding new gameplay to keep games fresh and interesting.

Given we were far from even Early Access at that point, we opted to start running larger playtests inside a closed beta and collecting feedback from the closed community instead of launching the game in public. This worked fabulous and we made considerable strides in improving the game, but even this started to run out of scale for some of the systems, as having a few hundred people in the game was a far cry from the 8000 players we supported for each world instance at the time, so we decided to launch the game in Early Access.

At this point, we had a building system that showed great promise, an intentionally simple combat system with a variety of PvE content ranging from simple ruins to larger dungeons, a vast, beautiful world for everyone to explore and the beginnings of a PvP system. The game was, and still mostly is, balanced so that it’s highly beneficial to cooperate with other players, which had worked well in the testing, but we wanted to get more insight on how this plays out with a larger group of players.

Enter June 2024 - the game launches in Early Access, and our real learning begins.

At this point, we were very excited and had a ton of plans for what we wanted to put into the game next, which, as you know, got published as a roadmap. In hindsight, we should have been clearer at that point about wanting to change the plans according to feedback from the community and the roadmap as published at that point was a 100% full booking from the team with relatively little booking for changes from all of you, which obviously started flooding soon after.

As you know, the first weeks were pretty rough. We discovered several issues that hadn’t been uncovered in earlier tests, despite those being pretty big. So, in the first month, the team was in firefighter mode and literally fixed more than 100 bugs a week, primarily based on reports from the players. While the fixing was ongoing, we were also collecting feedback from new players and reflecting the roadmap we had for the game against the feedback. And by reading all the feedback, it was evident that the first major update post-launch would have to focus on improving pretty much all areas of the game instead of adding significant new features.

The first update, Proving Grounds, included pretty massive changes to the world and progression. We’d underestimated the amount of time people would play the game alone, even if in a clan. So we restructured the PvE sites and added a significant amount of soloable and small group PvE content into the Heartlands. The combat system got extensive changes on the locomotion to stop the game from feeling like the combat was fighting your controls, which hugely improved the overall feel in combat. Literally everything was rebalanced, aiming to make crafting less grindy. Many locations in the world were found that could be blocked out in unintended ways, which were adjusted, and a lot of roads were added. A load of usability issues were fixed. Last but not least, we made significant changes to the building system to improve performance, where the towns and cities that all of you were building turned out to be a lot bigger than anyone had anticipated.

While most of the team was focusing on the Big Fix Update, we were working on two initiatives that saw the light of day later in the fall of 2024.

A huge patch updated the game to use Discord as the underlying tech for chat. Using their tech, we added a load of critical features into the game - friend list, DMs to friends and better public text channels, as well as prepped the game for more features like voice chat. Great communication tools are essential inside an MMO, and this was a big step toward improving them. Chat is also a good example of a feature we all take for granted in MMOs, and due to it being a prominent feature, we never really consider how much effort it takes to implement it well. For smaller developers, these must-haves can end up consuming a large portion of the team time, as no ready-to-use solutions exist for almost anything one needs in games.

The second big thing to land was the Market Square patch, which added the Gold currency and marketplaces you can build onto your plots. The market is a crucial piece of the puzzle for making the game economy interesting, and while we’d know this to be the case, many of you reminded us of this in a flood of feedback for this not being in the game before the update.

We added to Verse 2 in January by introducing another critical component of the game economy loop - Grace and Miracles. You get Grace by sacrificing Gold, which allows for a variety of non-combat spells to be cast, enabling Gold to have value. We originally intended to launch Grace and Markets at the same time, but the plan changed as we were implementing the two and discovered how hard it was to create a full-blown technical solution that works for an MMO. We deemed the markets inherently valuable and pushed them out early, with a plan to follow with Grace as soon as we could, which we did.

The Market Square update triggered a flurry of feedback. One of the biggest gripes you all had was the distributed nature of the markets. While building a stall on your plot was deemed great, running around a valley to find deals was considered too much effort, resulting in overall poor experience. We already had a design to address this, so based on the feedback this was prioritised as an important improvement.

The update in March added the ability to browse all the markets in the world area you were in at the time. While working on this, we also decided to improve the navigability of the world. The game earlier had a wind feature where you could mark a spot in the map and then press a key to get wind to blow in the direction of the marker, but this was both unknown to a lot of players and worked poorly in many world areas, so it didn’t actually help navigation very much. The replacement for the wind was a compass in the HUD, with indicators for your plots and other nearby points of interest, along with a marker to a market picked in the remote browsing, making the process of navigation a lot easier.

The update also added a bunch of building content, using a mix of ideas from our Discord community and our designs. We also added voice chat that had been requested by many players and automated the selection of harvesting tools for wood chopping and mining.

The next major update - Path of the Adventurer - took until June to go out. We originally wanted this to release around a month earlier, but the QA & polish process for the release ended up taking a lot longer than expected. What happened here is as follows.

One of the biggest sources of feedback for the game had been the combat system, or lack thereof, as some of you would say. The game launched with a very simple combat model and this clearly did not meet the expectations of many of you. The first update after launch fixed combat locomotion issues, which helped a lot, but the big missing feature was still the ability to meaningfully form the MMO holy trinity groups, with some players specializing as healers, some tanking and some acting as DPS. This also meant there was a very specific tank mage set of armor that was the most optimal for playing Pax Dei, which devalued a lot of the game progression and made it a lot less interesting than any of us wanted. The combat team decided to address this for real and started the combat system revamp already in November.

The work ended up taking six months, with a lot of the combat being essentially reimplemented. The changes are too numerous to list here, but with the new combat system and gear progression, we now have a much deeper, more interesting progression for combat, with the specialized roles the player community had been asking for.

At the same time, we had listened and learned quite a bit about how the world worked for a variety of things, from resource gathering to travel and PvE to population density. The world team decided to put these learnings into practice and make sweeping changes into the world. This meant increasing the amount of buildable area in the game to increase the population count of a world to 14,000 players, adding crafters around the Petrae Dei to make new player life and travel easier and redesigning the biome setup in the world to make the resources found in each biome more distinct.

This, of course, came with another massive balancing pass on the crafting to match the new biomes, but also to address another pain point from the community. While it was great that the crafting had co-dependencies between professions, we had implemented this in a manner where it was hard to progress in any of the professions without progressing in all of them. This was a massive undertaking for any player and not really what we wanted, where the intent had always been that you could progress in a profession as a master and not need to spend time in all professions. Verse 3 - Path of the Adventurer saw huge changes in this, for the better.

Our original plan was to launch these as separate updates, but come spring and us starting to package Verse 3 to be releasable, we realized the complexity of version management for the changes effectively forced our hand into combining everything into one huge update - bigger than any of the prior updates - and getting this into properly playable state took a lot longer than we expected.

This is pretty much where we’re at with the public updates at the time of writing this. We ended up making a huge amount of progress and changes during Early Access have improved the game significantly compared to a year ago. We did end up implementing a lot of things we’d talked about, but also as it happens, the changes we made based on learnings and feedback ended up eating a lot of our time, so not everything we thought of a year ago ended up making it into the game.

Having said that, let’s talk about what we think we’d like to do in the future.

Pax Dei is intended to be a living, breathing beast nurtured by both us at Mainframe and you, the players. Our job is to funnel a mix of our and your ideas into the game to make it as good as possible and ensure you have a great time playing and enjoying the company of everyone in the Pax Dei community. As such, we don’t foresee a future where we stop adding features and content into the game - the upcoming 1.0 moment is not the end of this continuous evolution of Pax Dei.

The big theme of what we’re planning to do next is the societies in the game. This entails organizing as groups beyond clans, both for your benefit but also for the purposes of conflict. In practical terms, we’re finally working on expanding the conflict and PVP in the form of the Feudal system and looking at adding a deeper social layer to the Grace mechanics. The main focus of development for the rest of the year is planned to be in this area. Our intent and goal is that, quite soon, each of you will not only belong to a clan, but also to other larger player-driven organizations that have influence in how the game plays.

While those systems form the basis for our work, we’ll also continue to work on items we’re hearing from the community. The social layers we’re looking at strongly synergize with finally improving the permissioning, both for clans and plots. We’re reading all your feedback on the crafting systems, and we’re indeed grinding our way through the balancing to improve the crafting experience and to make some of the less developed professions better. As an example, work is underway to make the foods and potions a lot more interesting, with a more diverse range of buffs. We’ll also definitely look into everything that touches the economy, from markets to loot, as it all ties strongly into how the game works as a social sandbox.

The next update of the game will start by setting the stage for what's to come. The old Lyonesse will be gone and replaced by a new, much larger Lyonesse, the same size as the other Provinces, which will be needed for the gameplay we’ll be introducing in updates as the year progresses. As a first taster, there will be two new resources exclusively available from Lyonesse, which will enable a new Enchanting feature tied to Alchemy and Jewelcrafting. After refining the resources with the two professions, you can manufacture consumables that permanently boost the Item Power of enchanted items. There are rumors that Cultists in the area are also interested in the resources, so keep an eye out for the gatherers and collectors in the area.

As an aside, one reason we’ve been changing the inventory icon symbols recently is the work related to showing the Enchantment status of items in the icon. The other related feature that needs a place in the icons is Master Crafting, where the design intent is that, in the future, any item with Item Power that gets crafted with a near 100% success rate will get an additional Item Power boost and Master Crafted label.

The rationale for these changes to Lyonesse is twofold. Firstly, with unique resources in Lyonesse, we wanted to tune the risk-reward for playing in Lyonesse. Especially with some of the harvesting being tied to PvE, the additional risk of PvP meant we wanted to make it easier to slip into Lyonesse, get some goods and slip out undetected, as the number of people playing in Lyonesse is expected to grow quite a bit.

Secondly, we don’t yet have an ETA for the other features we’re working on for Lyonesse, but we intend to add Trade Towns where you’ll bid gold to get hold of a plot safe from PvP, as well as PvP battling over controlling towers and their associated areas to build a home in Lyonesse. As mentioned above, this requires space in the world area.

The features in Lyonesse will be built on top of a foundational Feudal System. This is a new system that will allow the formation of PvP alliances, which will influence the PvP flagging in Lyonesse. We are also looking at connecting the alliances into a dominion system that will allow taxation of the player markets based on a set of rules on which properties the alliance controls in the world.

Last but not least, we’re looking at introducing Parishes. On a high level, this will mean the ability to create an altar that forms a parish, to which other players can join. As players in a parish earn grace, Priests and other members of the Parish who are in a position of power will gain a Grace kickback. This system will come with Miracles that are very expensive and effectively only available to the players in a position of power, with some tied into enabling actions for the Feudal alliances.

With all that said, thanks for reading until the end. We’ll be releasing more details on all of the above as things get closer to release.

Pax vobiscum,
The Mainframe Team

Hello Paxians,

Our latest content update is now live.

This minor content update is a continuation of Verse 3, in which we’re introducing quite a few changes to enhance your gaming experience. Let’s deep dive into what’s coming.

New Journal

We’re making updates to the UI, including the Journal, so that it displays recipes more effectively and smoothly, as well as the Plot window and item tooltips. It is still a work in progress, but most are here.

Storage at Petra Dei

We’re adding a personal storage at the Petrae Dei to complete the crafters already implemented with the previous patch. Each Petra Dei will have its own storage, serving as a private storage space for each player. Each Petra Dei storage unit starts with 20 slots and can be expanded to a maximum of 80 slots, with some Grace offerings.

New Sky, New Lights

We’re making visual updates to what we call the “Cosmos”. For example, you’ll be able to see new biome atmospherics and color grading. There will also be a new multilayered cloud system. We’re also improving the lighting in previously overly dark areas such as caves, forests and building interiors.

Markets

We’re now adding public permissions to market stalls. When a market stall owner cancels a sell order from another player, the items are returned to the redeeming queue of the owner of the sell order instead of to the inventory of the market stall owner. 

New notification system

The new notification system introduces several global improvements to enhance user experience and ensure clarity. Notifications are now consistently placed based on their type, always appearing on top without overlapping critical information. The updated menu aligns with the latest UX framework for a more streamlined interface. For default notifications, interactivity has been added to improve the discoverability of new content. To minimize clutter, notifications are now sequenced so that only one appears at a time, and similar types are grouped into a single message to prevent spamming. Pickup notifications have also been optimized, allowing a maximum of three to appear on screen simultaneously, reducing overlap. Additionally, both crafting/harvesting and combat skill notifications now feature improved and consistent tracking of XP progression, providing users with clearer feedback on their development.

Various bug fixes

This patch also presents a good opportunity for the team to implement several bug fixes. All details will be included in the patch notes, which will be published on the deployment day. 

Premium Status experience

As outlined in our recent blog post[playpaxdei.com], all Early Access players already benefit from the Premium Status, and this hasn’t changed. What’s new with this update is that these Premium bonuses are now explicitly visible and active in-game, allowing you to clearly see and feel the advantages while playing.

These include:

• +50% Grace from daily login

• +50% Grace from Gold offerings

• +50% XP on all activities

The XP rates themselves remain unchanged, as the original Early Access progression was already balanced with Premium Status in mind. However, we’ve taken this opportunity to increase the Grace bonuses, so you will notice a tangible improvement in Grace income after the patch.

NB: As with all things during Early Access, these values may evolve based on feedback and gameplay data.

Pax vobiscum,
The Mainframe Team

• Improved the Notifications UI with a new notifications system.

• Added player inventories at Petrae Dei.

• Players will now get an icon update notifying them they received a new Redeeming Queue item.

• Added button prompt to HUD on how to access the miracles menu.

• When XP is gained, a new progression bar is shown on screen.

• Added search bar to the building menu recipes.

• Icons preview is now shown when hovering over items in Construction Menu.

• Fixed some issues where the text was offset or cut off.

• Fixed an issue that prevented item icons from displaying on the Market Stall.

• Fixed an issue where the miracle radial menu button referring to the Grace menu was not interactable by LMB.

• Fixed an issue where plot outlines were not displayed correctly after having multiple plots joined together.

• Fixed an issue where the \[E] Split key in the Split Stack window was non-functional when using the keyboard.

• Fixed an issue where Chat settings would become unresponsive if the Player tried to access them from "General" chat.

• Fixed an issue where some items were only shown as an ingredient in the journal and not as a recipe.

• Fixed an issue where clicking on an ingredient in a recipe would not open the ingredient's description.

• Added Public sell permission.

• When sell orders are cancelled from market stalls other than the owner, the items from the cancelled sell order are added to the owner's Redeeming Queue.

• Removed search length limit for market orders.

• Fixed an issue where no Rarity and Tier were shown in list view for items listed for sale in a Market Stall.

• Fixed an issue where Ironroot Grasp ability worked differently against Players and NPCs.

• Improved the attack casting experience for staff: animation and VFX.

• Modified the placement of clay so that users can encounter it more frequently.

• Fixed graphical issues with foggy weather in dark interior locations.

• Fixed multiple slight misalignments of water in the North-Eastern part of Inis Gallia.

• Crafters and furnishing can no longer be placed in the air.

• Repositioned rubble assets, filled cavity near some stairs.

• Various small camp bug fixes.

• Fixed an issue with big rock formations, which had collision issues, sometimes appearing near roads.

• Fixed the rotation of some resources so they don't spawn in weird angles.

• Premium status was added to the game – see Release Notes for details.

• Fixed various issues with some wearable items.

• Reduced leather roughness globally.

• Fixed an issue where pressing ESC on a loading screen would cause the game to softlock.

• Fixed an issue where rapidly opening and closing the miracle menu would cause the game to crash.

• Fixed an issue which caused some bodies of water to flicker.

• Improved VFX for Taunt and Ambush spells.

• Improved VX for stances; protective stance no longer looks like defensive stance.

• Wool Fiber icon is now brighter and matches its 3D Model.

• Improved appearance of various icons for animal items that were using legacy art.

• Fixed some typos in texts.

• Added sound for arrows being knocked onto the bow whilst reloading.

• Added missing localization for multiple texts in Controls / Settings.

• Fixed an issue where the character’s eyes were looking up too much, especially in combat mode.

• Fixed an issue where the sound of "Breath of Balance" never ended.

• Fixed an issue with boar hurt sounds.

• Fixed a localization issue where buttons would become illegible when translated text was too long.

• Fixed an issue where the player's character crafting ability could be blocked if crafting when the crafter was destroyed by another Player.

• Fixed an issue with rubberbanding/lag in the wildlands.

• Fixed an issue with some spell descriptions displaying the text “Duration” instead of the value.

• Opening and closing the radial menus fast freezes the game and disconnects the character

• Sometimes, the game crashes when teleporting to the Tower of Emrys Gateway (Ancien Province)

• Corrupted Wolves in the dungeons cannot be skinned

• Sometimes, rarely, reviving players doesn't work in dungeons

• Shutters can sometimes be placed in the air

• No Party/Clan invites Notifications appear for newly created Characters after the game update.

• PvE floating number experience gains don't show the premium bonus. However, they are correct.

• There is no notification when unlocking a new fast travel destination.

• There is no notification when getting in range to summon the character's remnants.

• Adding an extra keybind to ‘Interact (Secondary)’ prevents players from sending personal invites to a Clan/Party via the player interaction menu.

• Character Creator: darker skin tones are uniquely accompanied by facial speckles.

• Notifications for new recipes fail to appear when an ‘unlocker item’ is picked up from a container.

• In the Equipment menu, the Examine feature is disabled and displays no assigned key.

• Miracle blessing duration shows "0" over other Players' heads - only visible to other clients.

• Player cannot see their other characters' plots that are in different Zones or Provinces.

• "Out of Stamina" often doesn't appear on the screen.

• "Out of Arrows" prompt appears when the player cancels bow draw, even when having arrows.

• Overgrowth spell (Sylvan Staff) does not apply direct heal.

• Netfall tooltip, description, and in-game effect durations are inconsistent.

• Spirit cost scales up with higher tiers for some spells, but the effect does not.

• Ambush ability's effect wears off if the player prepares any non-instant cast spell.

• Bloodfed Grove spell has visible stretched VFX in the initial casting phase.

• Sanctified and Quiet Stand have incorrect cooldown timer in the description.

• Alacrity Spell provides negligible spirit cost reduction across tiers.

• Revoke spell can be self-cast despite being intended only for enemies.

• Ironroot Grasp area of effect indicator clips into terrain and becomes partially or fully invisible

• Spell cooldowns may be misleading.

• When one of two unique chained effects disappears Chain VFX is removed.

• Chronoseer spell cooldown duration differs from the description.

• Zephyr of Life spell (Staff of Zephyr) triggers its effect one more time than indicated in the description.

• Bloodfed Grove spell active status icon missing above health bar, causing inconsistency in effect duration display.

• Pacify spell duration is much longer than stated in the description.

• Some spells that can be interrupted don't have their SFX stopped.

• The first cast of the Bloodfed Grove is not visible to other Players.

• Jester's Flask appears inconsistently during the throw.

• Some of the healing done through the Sacrament of Strife spell might not appear on the HUD when hitting multiple targets.

• Wording of Commanding Strike's description may confuse Players.

As we prepare for Pax Dei’s full release later this autumn (OMG, LEAK!!!), we’re excited to share full details about how the game’s pricing model will work, including how you can continue to enjoy the core Pax Dei experience without a subscription.

Earlier, we shared our release plans, and today, we’d like to delve deeper into what Core Access and Subscription mean, as well as how the new Plot Token system works.

Note that subscriptions will only be introduced at 1.0 release, for which we have no set date as of now. 

If you’re an Early Access Founder:

• You already have access to the game and won’t need to make any additional purchases to continue playing.

• You will receive a number of free Plot Tokens equivalent to the number of plots of your Founder’s Pack (1, 2, or 4). Each Token allows you to claim a plot for 1 month, or add 1 month to a plot you’ve already claimed. You decide when and how you spend your Plot Tokens. 

• You will also receive one month of Premium Status, granting you exclusive perks that will start the first time you log in. 

• You will keep your Character Slots and the Founder’s recipes granted by the Founder’s Pack you purchased during Early Access.

• Note that your Early Access progress will not carry over once the game is released, as all plots, characters, and shards will be wiped a few days before the 1.0 deployment.

Note: the descriptions of the Founder’s Packs on our website, Steam, and Epic store pages will be updated accordingly with this information. 

If you’re a new player, you’ll need to purchase the base game, which includes:

• Game access

• 2 Character Slots

• 1 Plot Token, allowing you to claim a plot for 1 month

• 1 month of Premium Status

You can then choose between 2 different ways of playing Pax Dei:

• Continue playing for free with access to the entire core experience.

• Subscribe to one of our Membership plans for added convenience, storage, crafting options, plot(s), and bonus rewards. 

Keep reading for all the details!

We want to be very clear: you do not need a subscription to enjoy Pax Dei.

The base game gives you:

• Full access to all gameplay systems: PvE, PvP, crafting, building, and more.

• Public crafting stations and storage in starting zones near the Petrae Dei.

• The ability to buy gear and consumables from other players, using Gold looted from PvE.

• The chance to join a Clan and use their plots, contributing to a shared village or an ambitious city.

• Access to high-tier crafting materials and rare loot through PvP.

This is the full game, not a demo or trial.

For players looking to claim and manage their own land, host friends, or dive deep into advanced crafting and trading, a subscription offers added depth.

By subscribing to a Membership plan, you will receive monthly:

• One month of Premium status, activated on the day you activate your subscription, which will grant you bonuses:

  • +50% Grace from daily login,

  • +50% Grace from Gold offerings,

  • +50% XP boost on all activities.

• 1, 2, or 4 Plot Tokens (depending on the subscription plan you choose).

  • Each Token allows you to claim a plot of land for 1 month, or add 1 month to a plot you’ve already claimed. 

  • You decide when and how you spend your Plot Tokens: one by one to maintain a single plot during several months, or all at one time, to maintain several plots during one month.

  • Maintaining your personal home in-game enables you to: 

    • Unlock unlimited storage by building your own containers.

    • Set up advanced crafters tailored to your playstyle.

    • Run a shop by setting up your personal Market Stalls.

    • Host your friends or clanmates by sharing your plot’s permissions.

Here are the Membership plans that will be available at the Pax Dei 1.0 release:

Note that subscriptions will only be introduced at 1.0 release, for which we have no set date as of now. 

After we exit Early Access, Plot Tokens will be the key to owning land in Pax Dei. Each subscription grants a set number of Plot Tokens every month:

• 1 Plot Token = 1 plot of land for 1 month.

• Tokens can be used to claim new plots or extend the duration of your current ones.

• You decide when and how you spend your Plot Tokens: one by one to maintain a single plot during several months, or all at one time, to maintain several plots during one month.

• When a plot expires, its contents are safely stored in your Redeeming Queue.

  • Once expired, your plot will enter a “frozen” state for a limited grace period. You will not be able to build or destroy anything while the plot is frozen. 

  • If you decide to spend a Plot Token to add one month to that plot, you just pick up where you left off.

  • If you choose not to add more time to that particular plot, then all your plot’s content will be safely stored in your Redeeming Queue after the grace period ends. 

• Tokens are yours to keep and use at any time, even after canceling a subscription.

• Tokens remain valid for 12 months from the date you receive them.

Please note that if you release your plot, your goods won’t be stored in your Redeeming queue, and your building will decay.

This gives you flexibility: whether you’re an active landowner or playing more casually, you remain in full control.

Each subscription plan grants one month of Premium Status from the start date, and this status is renewed automatically each time the plan is renewed. Premium Status and Plot Tokens are not tied: after canceling your subscription, you can run out of Premium Status but still have Plot Tokens left to activate, depending on how you use those. 

The bonuses granted by the Premium Status are: 

• +50% Grace from daily login,

• +50% Grace from Gold offerings,

• +50% XP boost on all activities.

Note: This is the first iteration of Premium Status perks, and they may evolve in the future to align with future content in Pax Dei.

To help you get familiar with the system, we’ll soon deploy a patch to the Early Access build, letting you experience the Premium status and its bonuses. Of course, this comes for free as part of your Founder Pack for the remaining duration of Early Access.

We’re also adding a personal storage at the Petrae Dei so you’ll be familiarized with the experience without a subscription. Each Petra Dei will have its own storage, serving as a private storage space for each player. Each Petra Dei storage unit starts with 20 slots and can be expanded to a maximum of 80 slots, with some Grace offerings.

Note: this is not the 1.0 release patch, and no subscription system will be activated during this test.

We’ll share a more detailed overview closer to the patch date.

We know monetisation is a sensitive topic, and we’re committed to making Pax Dei a game where you decide how to engage. We believe this model respects your time, gives flexibility, and keeps the core experience fully accessible to everyone.

As always, we want to hear your feedback, so please drop your questions in the dedicated Discord thread[discord.com].

Pax vobiscum,

The Mainframe Team

How many Plot Tokens can I purchase at the same time?

At 1.0 launch, we will offer Membership plans including either 1, 2 or 4 Plot Tokens. Plot Tokens are valid up to 12 months after purchase.

How long does the Premium Status last?

When you activate a subscription, you receive the corresponding number of Plot Tokens and the Premium Status for one month. The Premium Status is automatically activated upon subscription and renewed automatically with your subscription, every month.

Can I offer a Plot Token to a friend?

We do not propose this feature at present, but it is something we’d like to offer in the future.

What happens if my subscription ends, but I did not activate any of my Plot Tokens?

You are free to activate your Plot Token(s) at any time, regardless of whether you have an active subscription or not. Each Token has a duration of one month. Plot Tokens are valid up to 12 months after purchase. 

For example, your subscription ends on January 15, but you still have 2 unused Plot Tokens. You can choose to activate both on March 1st, or one on March 20 and the other on May 12. 

Does that mean I can have a plot active but no Premium Status active?

Yes. Premium Status and Plot Tokens are not dependent on one another. Premium Status is linked to your subscription and is automatically activated when you subscribe. Plot Tokens can be spent at any time while they are valid. Plot Tokens are valid up to 12 months after purchase.

Will we have regional pricing?

While regional pricing isn’t available at this stage, it’s something we’d love to offer and very much have in mind as we continue to grow and refine the Pax Dei experience.

We’re committed to making the game as accessible as possible. We regularly run promotions on Founder’s Packs, so keep an eye out for those opportunities. 

Can I purchase additional Character Slots?

Yes, we plan to offer the possibility to purchase additional character slots at some point around release, with a limit of 10 characters per account. 

Can I still buy a Founder’s Pack or Early Access bundle after release?

The Founder’s Packs are only available during Early Access. 

Can I subscribe at any time? 

Note that subscription will only be introduced after we exit Early Access, for which we have no set date as of now. After our 1.0 release, you will be able to subscribe to a Membership at any time and upgrade your game experience with additional benefits. Your subscription will then renew automatically every month. Membership is not required to play Pax Dei and is subject to cancellation by you at any time.

Can I stack Plot Tokens on a single Plot to be spent automatically or will I have to activate my Tokens manually every month?

You will have the option to renew plot periods automatically or manually. By default, upon expiration, a plot will attempt to consume an unspent token for renewal. However, you can disable this automatic feature if you prefer manual renewal. Additionally, you can frontload extensions by injecting multiple unspent tokens to extend the plot period's duration.

• Stamina Regen on food items (cooked, baked… all non-raw) has been increased by 100%.

• Raw food items were much stronger than intended; they’ve been nerfed. A more holistic revamp of food buffs is in the works, so these food item changes are temporary solutions.

• Jumping stamina cost has been reduced.

• Fixed the missing status effect icon for the Roar spell.

• Fixed the Killmark spell that did not give the movement speed buff after the target's death.

• Fixed an issue where sprinting while autorun was enabled did not consume stamina.

• Fixed an issue where players would sometimes be invisible to other players.

• Fixed some crash issues

• Fixed an exploit that was allowing players to ‘re-roll’ spawned enemies.

• Fixed the intro video

• Sprinting stamina cost has been reduced by ~30%.

• Jumping stamina cost has been reduced by 50%.

• Mantle stamina cost has been reduced by 50%.

• Base stamina regen has been increased by 25%.

• Stamina Regen on wearable items (armor) has been increased by 90%.

• Durability and Lifetime Durability on all wieldable items have been adjusted. Overall, the durability has increased, while the lifetime durability has decreased. This will mitigate the need to bring several weapons and shields into dungeons.

• Also, Tier 1 and Tier 2 wieldable items have less durability/lifetime durability than before, while Tier 3 and Tier 4 items have more durability/lifetime durability than before.

• Staves have seen their durability/lifetime durability decreased.

• The tools now have different and progressive durability/lifetime durability through the Tier.

• The XP needed to level up, for combat, crafting, and harvesting skills, have been reduced, especially for levels above 20. Getting to the skill max level is still intended to be challenging, but not quite as challenging as it was.

• XP earned from killing enemies of Tier 2 and above have increased.

• Soloable enemies (no skull icon) now distribute more XP when killed in a party of 2+ players. The enemies with a skull (intended for parties) still give more XP overall when engaged in a party.

• Harvesting skills now give XP based on the damage caused as a % of the total health of the tree/mineable/carcass being processed, so tools that cause more damage give more XP / XP event. With the earlier balance, using better tools in some cases was reducing the total XP earned due to chopping/skinning/mining faster and this no longer happens.

• The XP earned in mining, woodchopping, and skinning has been re-balanced to match the new level requirements, so the total amount of actions needed to reach the skill cap has been reduced significantly compared to earlier balances.

• Note: XP progression of the harvesting skills is not currently popping in the HUD when harvesting.

• We recognized that progression in the Carpentry skill, particularly at higher levels, currently feels too restrictive. While we plan to address this more thoroughly in an upcoming update, we've made some immediate adjustments:

  • Lime Mortar recipe difficulty has been reduced to 35.

  • All level 39 unlocks have been moved down to level 30.

These changes should help ease the bottleneck while we work on a broader rebalancing.

• Damage to shields from blocking has been reduced by 75%.

• Inquisitor Captain’s Rallying Cry damage buff has been reduced by 80%.

• Searing Rage damage bonus now correctly scales with higher-tier items.

• Imps summoned by Cultist overseers no longer give combat XP when killed.

• The skill required to use low-tier wieldables is now correctly shown.

• The skinning hardness of some animals has been reduced.

• Fixed multiple cases where the game unintentionally changed avatar movement mode to walking.

• Resource instances should now be properly rotated.

• Some plant max sizes have been adjusted

• The Sacrament of Strife sound effect has been adjusted.

• The Aura of Life VFX no longer sticks forever when double-activated.

• A keybind field was added to the settings/keybinds menu to allow players to hide the UI.

• Fixed a number of recipe unlocks that we overlooked when we simplified unlocking requirements to either rely on skill level or key ingredient discovery (not both).

• Fixed an issue where HP were not granted adequately upon respawn after death.

• Some item descriptions have been fixed to show correct data instead of a {} tag.

• Fixed some localization issues where debug strings were displayed to players.

• Fixed some bugs that were crashing the game.

• Fixed a bug where resurrecting at a shrine sometimes resulted in having 100 health instead of 1000.

• The combat skill XP requirements and ranges of XP earned for enemies have been comprehensively revamped. The XP for a Tier 1 base level enemy is now 100 XP, with other enemies scaling this number up or down based on the enemy tier and rank. The resulting combat XP requirements are now very close to the crafting skills.

• The XP gained from hard-to-kill enemies has been increased relative to the easier-to-kill enemies. The XP requirements to level up have been adjusted, so it’s highly beneficial to group up and hunt for harder-to-kill enemies instead of grinding easy kills in Heartlands. With the combination of the two, there’s no more effort to level up to the skill cap if you solely kill easy enemies and less effort if you group up and go after the hard enemies.

• XP earned when in parties has been tuned. Enemies intended for soloing now distribute the XP across the party in a manner where the total XP earned by the party is the same as if you were soloing the enemy. Enemies intended for parties now give an increasing amount of total XP based on the party size, for up to 3.3x their base XP for a party of 6, so the most effective way to level up should always be to party up.

• XP gained from animals has been significantly increased to make it easier to level up combat skills related to hunting.

• Fixed a bug related to some enemies giving 0 XP.

• Fixed a bug related some enemies giving more XP.

• Bow damage has been increased across all tiers.

  • The arrows provide a stronger progression on damage.

  • Bow damage has been increased throughout the whole itempower range.

  • The bow handling and draw speed increases faster with itempower.

• Fixed an issue that caused Aura of Life spell to cause lingering particle effects and performance drop

• Breath of Joy I & II, Surging Stride and Spirit Stride now do not interrupt autorunning once activated.

• Quiet stand and Sanctified Stance now handle their cooldown properly, consistent with the item slot they are in. They also now correctly forces the other one on cooldown when attempted to overlap their activations.

• Fix for Divine Intervention applying both the <40% heal and normal heal when it was applied.

• Divine shield now only reflects damage up to a maximum value described in the spell's description

• Greatsword weapon special "Guardbreaker" now properly forces a block break in PvP

• Killmark spell now correctly grants movement speed when the target is killed.

• Sacrament of Strife healing provided appropriately scales with ItemPower.

• Fixed an issue where some status effects were not removed with cleanse or revoke.

• Windlash now correctly shows the duration of the chained status.

• Fixed an issue with Jester's Flask spell disappearing when throwing at other characters.

• Fixed revoke not removing divine rapture stacks from the target.

• Fixed for all non damaging spell projectiles doing damage based on the wieldable damage

• Hold to interact resource gathering will now correctly re-equip offhand wieldables upon completion.

• Resource node hardness value now matches the tool's tier required to gather it. (0-4)

• Gathering tool damage progression was rebalanced, significantly increasing the tool damage across the whole range.

• Skinning hardness of wolves were increased to 1 (in the new range).

• Skinning health was rebalanced for all skinnable animals

• Fixed audio from Water wells being too loud.

• Polished audio for sitting animations.

• Fixed an issue with Tempest Command not playing its chain sound on bound enemies.

• Recipe List refresh on level up.

  • When you gain a profession level while crafting and you unlock new recipes, the recipe list now automatically refreshes and you no longer need to manually reopen the crafter.

• Crafting Time Reduction

  • Crafting timers were very excessive (especially when crafting gear). We've reduced these timers substantially or by roughly 1/2. We will continue to monitor feedback regarding them for future refining of the system.

  • Gear should now take 9-12 rolls to craft, based on recipe complexity (down from a whooping 21 roll afk coffee break).

  • Once fully Mastered, these crafts should only require you 3-4 rolls.

  • Other non-gear recipes should also be slightly faster.

• Recipe Unlock Progression

  • Many crafting stations — particularly processing crafters — previously had unclear progression paths that often left players confused or blocked. It wasn’t always obvious what each station was for or how to progress in the associated profession, largely due to missing or hidden recipes.

    • To improve this, we’ve made recipe progression more transparent: more recipes are now unlocked by default, and key recipes that were previously gated behind obscure item requirements now unlock through skill progression instead.

    • These changes affect many crafters including Spinning Wheels, Looms, Tanning Racks, Charcoal Kilns, Pottery Kilns, Furnaces, Tailoring Tables and Leatherworking Tables.

• More crafting stations unlocked by default

  • We wanted to smoothen out some basic progression discovery at the start and therefore the Founder’s Crafting Table, Basic Charcoal Kiln, the Log Workbench and the Basic Furnace are now all unlocked by default in the build menu.

• Furnace Parts

  • Many of you reported that they couldn't find the recipe for Furnace Parts Sorry!!. The recipe can now be found in the Basic Forge, as it should :)

• Steel Anvil and other unintended items

  • Quite a few items accidentally made it into the game in the latest creation, same with recipes or items visible in the Journal that shouldn't have. A lot of these were either deprecated items or placeholder items that may or may not be part of future content releases. They've now been properly removed. Example: Steel Anvil.

• Nightshade Fruit

  • A recipe for the T2 Alchemy Workbench mistakenly called for a “Deadly Nightshade Fruit” — which, tragically, did not exist. It now correctly asks for Nightshade Fruit. Please note: we still do not recommend eating it. Side effects may include confusion, nausea, alchemical mishaps, and/or death.

• Crafting Blessings at max level

  • When using a profession blessing at level 40 takes you to level 41 but it didn’t effectively increase your skill beyond 40. Now it will! 

• Fixed an issue in the Construction hammer UI where "Claim a plot to start building crafters" in German and French exceeded its designated space

• Updated localization in several instances.

• Clay now spawns in greater density around water, in addition to new spawn locations near cliffs.

• Hunters have discovered a breakthrough in animal carcass logistics. You can now pile up 20 of them.

• Game no longer switches to walk mode when opening inventory while stationary or when interacting with crafters.

• Spirit regain floating text numbers are now only visible to the user.

• Healing floating text numbers are scaled down when targets are at full health.

• Arrow recipes (in the crafting menu) now show the intended item description.

• Fixed an issue where swapping equipped items which share the same base granted spell would lose the ability to determine the granting item (and thus their ItemPower) causing them to fall back to minimum stats.

• Fixed sprint players being able to sprint without consuming stamina after passing zone boundary

• The gold amount shown in the top bar and in your inventory will now consistently show you the correct amount.

• You can no longer open the Redeeming Queue and Redeem items while dead.

• Consumables now correctly show the cooldown of it instead of the duration of its effect.

• Fixed some world areas close to the the Province edges that had an unintended non-blocking landscape mesh.

• Teleporting while wielding a hammer no longer results in an extra cylinder in game view.

• Fixed an issue to address various server crashes.

Hello Paxians,

Following the Q&A from early June, we received additional questions regarding audio in Pax Dei and in Verse 3 in particular.

Here are some answers from our audio team!

As before the patch, there are only ambient and combat modes, but both modes have been heavily revised. In particular, ambience now has more than double the amount of new music, and the soundscape itself has been revised with new details, some of which have been removed and mixed differently. We still have some work to do here.

It is meant to be fully customizable depending on which armour you are wearing and your movement. Currently, only certain types of armour detect changes and detect only bigger changes in materials, but the plan is to have it much more granular in the future.

It is meant to work that way, so that every little piece has some contribution, but certain types are also not very audible. We haven’t had the opportunity to create all that content yet, but the plan is as your question suggests.

Currently, no, and stone will be stone for now, but it would definitely fit into the granular style of the game to allow that kind of detail.

Currently, there is no indoor system available to detect it on player-built structures. Some dungeons and certain areas of camps and adventure sites have gotten some added manually in controlled areas, but a systemic approach is yet to be fully functional and implemented.

Currently, it is only on base material, but the technical setup is already able to determine every weapon, wearable, etc. from one another. Therefore, technically, we can add sound to any unique item; it just takes time to create the content. We would definitely like the higher-tier weapons to sound cleaner and impressive than the lower tiers.

Not yet; the audio for weapons hasn't been revised in a while, and there will be a bigger content push in that regard at a later point.

Most special attacks have custom audio that plays along with the typical weapon swings and attack sounds - the game is also mixed quite differently from before, and weapons and special attacks are much clearer and upfront, also sounding different in the mix.

All special attacks are meant to have a little or big special sound with them, to make it more apparent that you made a special attack.

That would be a game design decision rather than the actual audio design of it - the sound itself can be changed for players and what you hear, but that decision would be a game design decision, as well as what NPCs hear would be in that field. But it's a very good point and idea.

The mix is different, prioritization of which sounds are allowed to play and changes to when in combat over ambience have been made.

Not directly.

That’s because of the floor material and steps being played while crafting - most of the steps have been altered to play a quieter version of themselves if standing pretty much still.

Finding good recordings is really hard, and background noise is quite apparent. The first pass of the goat still needs some love to be where we want it to be, but it's a mix of various goat recordings and a lot of editing, especially for more combat-focused sounds, as we can’t really go punch a real goat to get that sound, can we?

Pax vobiscum,

The Mainframe Team