Cover image features Lilith – Concept Exploration artwork by Kiana Hamm whose art style and direction brought us the beauty of Nighthaven, as well as many beloved skins and characters from Aeternum.
What Katy Did Next
This is a series of articles keeping the remaining player base updated with what’s happening in New World. We will provide a summary of developer comments from the official discord, along with any other news about the game. The goal is to publish these monthly, with this edition covering February 2026.
Contents
Quality of Life Roadmap
The skeleton crew for New World Aeternum have been working hard to produce a Road Map for some fun quality of life improvements in our final year of playing the game. We’re very excited about some of these, especially the extra Gear Slots! It sounds like we will have to purchase them, and while some players are not happy about that, I’m still playing daily and intend to take full advantage of this QoL gift.
Region Transfers are also planned for this coming month, so it will be interesting to see what kind of cooldown we have and where the population chooses to settle itself. I think I’ll take an alt on an adventure overseas but don’t want to risk my main character in case of getting lost in transit.
We’re not sure what unlocking the transmogs means, but assume you will still have to use a transmog token at the Stylemancer but will be able to choose from any item appearance, not just the ones you’ve discovered. If so, this might be our chance to try some older or unreleased shop skins.
Increasing umbral cap will make build crafters happy and also reduce any pressure to spend when we don’t have something to upgrade.
Daily mutation rotation will mean the retirement of our long running series of articles. It’s good news though, as players won’t have to wait for weeks to get the artifacts they need from mutated expeditions.
Achievement hunters will be happy to see they can finally get credit for broken Steam achievements and Evolys has indicated they are prepared to fix any others that might be broken, so send in your reports. Observant players may have noticed they quietly received the First Light standing Steam achievement this month. If you didn’t get it, try logging into a different region to trigger the credit.
Odd additions
There are a few things on the list that seem unusual, such as increasing the daily Gypsum limit. I can only imagine that demand for matrices is higher on the more populated servers, as the “free” daily Gypsum from the Well of Fortune and Faction vendor is more than enough to satisfy us on Delos.
I’m also surprised that people are still running enough mutations to exceed their cap, but AGS have data of a far wider range of players than our word of mouth. Same with Soul Trials, I really didn’t think anyone ran them beyond getting Powerstone, as the loot is so bad.
Concerns have been raised about the increased AFK timer and Katy has promised to keep an eye on it.
What we'd like to see
It seems that being given something always triggers a desire for something else. Here’s a few things we would have liked to see on the QoL list:
- Tenacity and Focus sets in the Soulwarden Forge.
- Increase the number of Soulmarks granted from chests (at least double).
- Return Socketed crafting to the S10 release state where we could add one craft mod.
- Reduce the number of queued players required for OPR to pop (10 has been suggested).
- Increase the chance for rare furniture drops, such as the Goldfish in Porcelain bowl and rare Brimstone furniture schematics.
- Allow us to have more than 3 houses.
- Add Chromatic Seals back into the Hive of Gorgons loot table. Or add them as a low chance in Nighthaven chests, to make those chest runs more appealing.
- Unlimited consumables in OPR and CTF.
- Remove Stifling set.
- Increase Mercenary limit for wars – 35 for attack, 25 for defense – or remove merc limits.
Double Gem items
Among the discord feed below, there is confirmation that double gem slots will not be added to the list of issues to address. What this means is that it’s safe to craft double gem slot weapons if you want to.
There are a couple of ways to get two gem slots on an item. The first thing you will need is a Gem Setting Pins charm from the faction vendor. A select few named items can be upgraded with a gem slot charm at the gypsum kiln. This includes some shields (single gem instead of none), event items, and items from the PVP track. I haven’t made a comprensive investigation into which items can have a gem slot, but have included a couple of screenshots below and will leave you to do your own testing. There are a lot of items that can’t take an extra gem slot. Please comment with any items you find.
The other way to get double gem slot items is by crafting Brutish Replicas. If you want the item to be upgradable to 800GS, you’ll need full crafting buffs. You can get the Shard of Pride and Banner Fragments as loot during PVP. Or you can purchase them from the faction vendor. You’ll get an item with two gem slots, the “inherent perks, like Acutely Empowered, and 2 random perks from the brutish perk pool. For weapons, this is a 3.35% chance for a weapon ability perk and a 1% chance for generic perks. Attunement, Mortal, and PVP perks require a craft mod so won’t roll.
Discord Feed
All this and more can be found in our dev discord feed. You can head to the official discord to see if I’ve missed anything out. Search from: NW_Kay or NW_Evolys to keep track of posts in real time, or check back here in a month for our next installment.
Concerns about abuse of 24 hour AFK timer.
More world boss issues.
In reponse to asking for Chromatic seals to be dropped in Hive of Gorgons again.
In response to a question about spawning in giant Thorpes and Turkeys.
In response to whether there is a plan to disable New World as it’s “a little out of control”.
QoL Roadmap details.
Note that these changes are just QoL and not bug fixes. No specific patches, just being deployed during maintenance.
First Light Steam achievement.
Fun mounts.
No Forged in Aeternum closure video.
A glimpse into what could have been – Thunder Gauntlets!
Territory ownership bug fixed on Devaloka.
Everyone wants region transfers!
Deflection of questions about anyone buying New World.
World boss events like Legacy of Crassus or Expeditions Unleashed not spawning on some servers.
Double gem slot items will not be addressed so you can go ahead and craft them if you like.
Issue with territories held by deleted companies being unable to be declared on.
Request for old and discontinued cosmetics to be re-released. Unlocking transmogs is an elegant solution to a range of requests like this.
Players who accessed New World through Playstation Plus looking for help.
Question about achievements.
Ongoing delays for region transfer.
Players don’t like the OPR and CTF rotation.
Removal of the Stifling set is on their radar.
