Returning player catch-up
The last time you logged in, weapons came from fragments and Virtue Lith was how you respecced. Preludes 15: Gods & Ghosts went live June 10, 2026, and five of its changes land directly on your account. Work through them in this order and you are caught up in about 15 minutes: 1. reallocate your Virtues → 2. sort out old weapon fragments → 3. learn Tempers and Craftwork → 4. unlock trading → 5. add Turret Jotar to your siege schedule.
Step 1 — Reallocate Your Virtues (Free)
Virtue Lith was removed outright in Preludes 15. Your Courage, Spirit, and Grace split now reallocates free, per loadout, in Arsenal → Virtues — every loadout keeps its own allocation, so an alt setup can run a different spread at zero cost.
Two notes for returning accounts:
- Old Virtue Lith in your inventory no longer has a use — stop stockpiling it.
- Before committing points, open your main weapon's page and match your allocation to its listed attunement and required Virtue value (every weapon records both).
The full system breakdown is in Virtues explained.
Step 2 — What to Do With Your Old Weapon Fragments
The most-asked coming-back question, answered straight: do not mass-delete fragments yet. The loot system now splits by star tier:
- 1–2 star weapons now drop fully built from enemies, chests, and activities — whole weapons on the ground, Craftwork and Tempers previewable before pickup. Fragments are no longer the main route for these tiers.
- 3 star weapons still use fragments → craft at Tuvalkane (Marrow's Bane, Gathannan, Seathorn) — keep every fragment. Purity is the outlier: it drops whole from the Mendicant King and Reforges instantly.
- Pre-patch crafted weapons were converted to Stock or Noble quality and can still be refined. Hotfix 2 mailed Chaos Chordstones to accounts holding old Stock weapons — check your Dispatches mailbox before dismantling anything.
The safe rule: before deleting a stack, open that weapon's page and read its current acquisition method and last-verified date. The per-weapon table lives in farming routes.
Step 3 — The New Weapon System (Tempers + Craftwork)
Two properties now decide whether a drop earns a bag slot:
- Tempers are a weapon's rolled affixes — attack speed, elemental effects, Smite chance, comparable to totem effects. Preview them on the ground before pickup; a bad roll can simply be left behind.
- Craftwork is the weapon's build quality. The community rule of thumb: judge drops by quality and Temper count, not by which specific Tempers rolled — and don't shard an old favourite the moment something new drops. Compare first.
Upgrading a keeper is Refine, not re-crafting: queue it at Tuvalkane and spend Chordstones to uplift Craftwork and add Tempers. Higher Chordstone tiers need Lampyrites from sieges and Cogah. One quality-chain tip: Noble and above dismantle into Lampyrites; Officer and below only give scrap. The whole pipeline is in Chordstone refining.
Step 4 — Player Trading (New in Preludes 15)
Face-to-face trading runs at Enclaves and World Trees — both players must be in the same instance, and you initiate with the Trade emote on the Equipment wheel (PC default X + RMB).
- Tradeable: crafted weapons and armour, talismans, Joineries, Runes, Totems, and most resources.
- Not tradeable: Arcs, Founders-exclusive items, account-bound rewards, and quest items — greyed-out rows in the trade window are restricted.
- Mail: Dispatches (account mail) carries items when you are not co-located, with a delivery delay of roughly real-world hours.
Every completed trade costs Scutage, a Dracs tax scaled to item value — Hotfix 14 (July 29) cut that burden by 90%, so buying crafted weapons with good Tempers from other players is now genuinely cheap. The first-trade failure checklist is in the Trading guide.
Step 5 — Turret Jotar Siege
The fourth siege of Preludes 15 — a Clan Jotar watchtower, and per community consensus the hardest of the four. What a returning player needs:
- Schedule: roughly a 3-hour cooldown between runs (verify in-client); active sieges list on World Tree Votive Shrines, and the four rotate Mirifuir → Kearnhold → Curlail → Turret Jotar.
- Objectives are randomized — defend the Skylantern, destroy supply caches, or eliminate the Ode commander. You do not need to wipe every enemy for S-rank: complete the objective set and burn the Skylantern.
- Rewards: Grinn and Unsula weapons, runes, and materials including Glow Lampyrite — the siege material that feeds Chordstone casting, which is where your Refine economy starts.
Track it with the Daily Reset tool and boss progression tracker; the full walkthrough is the Turret Jotar guide. One warning worth repeating: siege loot only commits to your inventory after you return to the Nightfold — don't log out mid-route.
Your First Week Back
- Day 1: Steps 1–2 above, then re-add the Agari loop — world bosses on a 30-minute respawn, tracked by the Agari timer.
- Days 2–3: rebuild Faction Standing — turn in Votives at World Tree shrines to reopen your Faction track (factions guide).
- Week 1: run sieges on cooldown to bank Lampyrites for Refining.
- After that: re-try Cogah — enemies now start at level 50 and scale with party size, so the difficulty is not where you left it.
Next steps