Playtest build

What's new

Shardbound is in a closed playtest. This page lists what is in the current build, what changed since the last one, and the problems we already know about.

Found something? Press F8 in the game (or Menu > Feedback) to send a report with a screenshot. It goes straight to the developer.

!Known issues

Known issues

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Build 0.10

Looks & feelOctober 2026

A big visual and audio pass, and a smoother first hour.

New land: The Sundered Reach

  • A wide highland for levels 24 to 28, down the Lightfall from Mistfall Isle: Cairnfold, Glasstorn Moor, the Listening Stones, the Shardscar Gorge, Mirrortarn and the Sundered Stair to the Underdeep.
  • The Lightfall story (13 quests), two dailies, the Cairnkeepers faction, duelist Iselde, world quests, the Glassgale event, two rares and an elite.
  • New dungeon The Sundered Hall (level 26, Heroic 28) with Nhal, the Lightdrinker.

New looks

  • Binders rebuilt: one smooth body, layered clothing with real seams, ribbing and folds, a sculpted face and hair with volume.
  • Every creature reworked: anatomy, jaws, wings with bones, element materials, and clearly different variants.
  • Every mount reworked: real gaits, manes and tails, tack with stirrups and reins, and smooth starts and stops.
  • Professions come alive: you kneel to pick herbs, swing a pickaxe, draw light from shards, cast a line, and craft at a cauldron, sawhorse, anvil or floating card. Players near you see it too, and the cast bar is smaller.

Duels

  • New effects: summons per element, fusion moments, impact hit-stop, shatter and dissolve, a targeting arrow and turn banners.
  • A duel log you can read along with in the phase bar, or open in full with L.
  • Fix: the Sacrifice, Target, Material and Attack chips under your creatures now always sit above your hand, so you can tap them at every screen size. Your hand dips and fades while you choose on the field.
  • Balance: Forge Drake, Riptide Raider and Granite Charger are now 1700/1200, Gloomfang Stalker 1700/1100 (were 1800 Power). They were the strongest commons in the game.
  • Smarter opponents: most NPCs, elites, dungeon and raid bosses now sacrifice for creatures with a strong effect (Dawn Oracle, Twinblade Kestrel), keep their Guardians face-up on guard, save traps for real threats and bait yours. The battleground's AI Binders press harder still. Kael, the practice duel and the lesson stay as gentle as before.
  • PvE retuned for the smarter opponents: Mother Glimmerweb and Gnashjaw in Whisperwood are friendlier again. Ossuar, Corran and Hrimgar are a little tougher. The three sky elites, the Waking Colossus and a few dungeon stages have lost their worst spikes, and the Rootheart's Normal boss is beatable at about the Sundered Hall's rate.

Deck building

  • A new deck builder (C): your collection on the left with a clear + Add and − on every card, your deck on the right grouped into Creatures, Spells, Traps and the Fusion Deck, with − and + on every line. A live checklist shows what your deck still needs ("29 / 30–40 · 1 more needed") before you save.
  • Search, filters (element, level, rarity, set, owned, keywords like Bloom, Bind and Fusion) and sorting, remembered between visits, plus a compact list view. Right-click a card, hold it on a phone or press its i to read it: the preview no longer covers the card you click.
  • Auto-fill completes your deck from your collection, Suggest improvements gives the duel coach's deck tips, Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Clear. A level curve and element bar, an unsaved-changes marker, and copies of decks you can keep on your device. On a phone, tabs switch between Collection and Deck.
  • Full controller support: the d-pad walks the cards, their − and +, the filters, your deck's lines and the tools; A adds, X adds the card you're on, Y shows it, LB/RB switch the tabs and B closes the tip, the preview, then the window. With the keyboard, Tab and Enter work too.
  • Deck slots: your account keeps up to 8 named decks, each with its own Fusion Deck, on every device. The Decks button above your deck lets you switch, rename, duplicate or delete them and start a new one; Use in duels picks the deck your duels use. Copies you kept on your device can be imported once.

Card set 3: The Rootheart

  • 35 new cards from the Underdeep: the first Binders, Seren, Warden Ilvane, the Hollow and its blight. 163 cards in all.
  • Two new keywords. Bloom: the creature grows stronger at the start of each of your turns. Bind: the target turns face-up in attack position and can't attack or change position on its owner's next turn.
  • Answers to walls and ways back into a lost game: Splinter the Root, Rootfall, Seren's Mercy, Last Light. No new Guardians.
  • The Rootheart pack in the Card Shop (150 Shards), card drops in the Underdeep and from the Rootheart dungeon, and two new Cardcrafting bindings.

Riding

  • Mount gear: saddles, barding, reins, ornaments and mount dyes, one loadout per mount.
  • Riding training with Edda Brightrein, and Bramble, your first horse, from level 8.

Battlegrounds

  • Crystal Run, a second battleground: steal the enemy crystal from its dais and carry it home through a gorge split by a chasm. First to three.
  • Carriers run slower and can't ride; Windrune shrines give a burst of speed; duels only start near a crystal, and a beaten carrier drops it.

Shops and rewards

  • The Weekly Bazaar: Quill Marrowby's market stall gets new stock every Monday, with cosmetics you can't find anywhere else.
  • Set packs vary more: the last card of a Rootheart pack no longer keeps landing on the same Fusion creature, and a card you already own three of is skipped when another one is left.
  • The Binding Table: turn spare Dust into missing cards or boosters, within a weekly limit.
  • Sell the furniture you craft: Carpentry pieces in your Den storage now go on the Shard Exchange, whose Sell tab is grouped by category with a search box, and every sale, purchase, return and new listing sends you a clear mail.
  • Foils & Borders at the Card Shop: make any card you own a shimmering foil, or give your cards a Gilded, Verdant, Obsidian or Starlit border, all for Dust. Your opponent sees them in duels; dyes and titles at the Bazaar take Dust too.
  • New Honor goods, five Honor ranks with titles, and a weekly Conquest Chest once the vendor is bought out.
  • Rested XP: time offline in the city or your Den doubles creature and gathering XP for a while.
  • Shard Pass prestige: every tenth tier past 100 still pays out.
  • The Starfall Festival (February): catch falling stars in the city and bring them to the Starwell.
  • A letter from Archivist Pell now leads level 23 players down into the Underdeep.

Duels, faster

  • When you have no other choice, the duel moves on by itself (with a moment to press Wait); an attack with one possible target goes straight in. Both can be switched off under Settings › Duel.
  • Duel review: after a match, see where it turned and what else you could have done.

Sound

  • New music for every area, duel music that rises with the stakes, boss and raid themes.
  • Effects per element, footsteps per surface and 3D ambience. Sound now starts on every device.
  • The opening scene is now voiced: the narrator, Elder Sora and Kael speak their lines while the music steps back. Turn it off with "Voiced cutscenes" in Settings › Sound, and set its loudness with the new Voice slider (also on the minimap speaker).

The first hour

  • "What next?" always points somewhere, travel quests hand in where you are, and welcome messages no longer pile up.
  • Townsfolk, animals and spots no longer stand in walls, water or the air. Rare elites, world bosses and event shards no longer turn up on top of gather nodes, quest givers, waystones or dungeon gates, and creatures keep clear of the spots where you arrive in an area.

World and windows

  • Whisperwood is three times bigger: a ring of forested hills, Warden's Way, and six new places to find, from Greywatch Tower to the hidden Whisper Hollow. Shadowfen Marsh (boardwalks, bog pools and the Leechmother's Grotto) and the Glasswaste (Glassmouth Bay, the Sunken Necropolis, the Bone Sea) grew the same way, and the Shattered Sky gained 23 floating islands linked by bridges and glowing wind paths. In the Frostspire Peaks, four passes now cut through the cliff ring into the high country beyond. Ember Quarry's pit now sits in a wide upland reached by four haul roads, and the Tidewater Docks gained headlands, lighthouses and a smugglers' cove. Four tunnels now lead out of the Underdeep into a far greater cavern: Deepwarden Hold, the Cinder Rift, the Prism Grottos, the lake of Mirrordeep, Lanternfall Camp, the Sporewood and the hidden Lost Lantern.
  • Waystones: touch one to attune to it, then travel from any attuned waystone to another (or from the Shardfall Waystone in the city) after a short cast. Free inside an area, a small Shards fee between areas, and they glow and show on the map once attuned.
  • A queue eye on the minimap: while you wait for a battleground, the Raid Finder, a rated or a quick match, or while you are listed in the Group Finder, a small eye on the minimap shows it, with your time in queue (or the listing's time left and its join requests) on hover and a menu to leave a queue, remove your listing or open its window. It flashes when your match is found.
  • New on the site: a cinematic flythrough of every area and a 2½-minute world tour.
  • Look up: drag the camera below level and it slides along the ground toward you, to see the sky, the tower and the treetops. Right-click the speaker by the minimap for volume sliders.
  • Every area dressed up: grass, flowers and pebbles, wall-base rubble, shoreline foam, weather, mist and birds.
  • Real water with depth, waves and reflections; frozen lakes with cracks and frost; light shafts, fireflies and an aurora.
  • Skylines: far ridges, the tower's crown, a volcano, ships at sea, floating islands, and a true cave ceiling in the Underdeep.
  • Wilderness polish: smoother coastlines, driftwood, ruined crofts and a cliff stair in the Tidewater Docks, varied burnt trunks and basalt on Ember Quarry's skyline, no more cracks on the Sundered Reach's slopes, and forest crowns that no longer turn black when you stand beneath them.
  • One design for every window: the same headers, tabs and close button, Esc everywhere, full-screen sheets on phones.
  • Phones, tablets and controllers: the Weekly Bazaar, Binding Table and Foils & Borders are full-screen sheets on phones (nothing cut off at the bottom), a controller can browse and close them and the duel review and match log, B presses Wait during auto-pass, the Den bar no longer covers the minimap buttons, and bigger tap areas on the duel review and the welcome page.
  • Controllers in every window: the Wardrobe, Mount and Pet journals, the Shard Exchange and Mailbox, the welcome, feedback and report dialogs work with the d-pad and close with B, LB/RB switch a window's tabs, and the Den's decorate mode has a stick cursor (A places, X turns). In the Den the beam down the middle of the room now fades when it stands between the camera and your Binder.

Faster

  • The world loads in about half the time, return visits in under a second, and a memory leak on zone changes is gone.
  • Weak laptops and phones pick a fitting quality on their own, with a loading screen and a battery-friendly frame rate.
  • Travelling between areas is quicker: up to 40% less time on a black screen in the big wild areas, and no stutter in the first moments after you arrive.

Build 0.9

First playtestOctober 2026

The first build for outside players. Everything below is in the game today.

The duel

  • 128 cards in six elements, including set 2 and Fusion.
  • Decks of 30 to 40 cards, at most 3 copies of a card, plus up to 10 Fusion creatures.
  • Duels in a 3D arena, every rule checked on the server: you never see your opponent's hidden cards.
  • A lesson duel with Kael, a practice duel with hints, and the Codex (F2) for every rule and keyword.
  • Match numbers and a full log of each duel (Hero window, P).

The world

  • Nine areas, from Shardfall City to The Underdeep, each with its own story, creatures and daily quest.
  • More than 100 quests, levels 1 to 30.
  • Wild creatures that scale to your level, elites and rare elites.
  • World quests, world bosses with shared Shard Health, and zone events (G).

Dungeons, raids and the endgame

  • 10 solo dungeons in Normal and Heroic, each with a boss rule.
  • The Shard Spire raid for 3 to 5 Binders, with a Raid Finder and AI allies.
  • From level 30: Shard Resonance, Rifts with weekly affixes, the Vault and Shard Sigils.
  • Battlegrounds: Shardfall Ruins, Dawn against Dusk (T).

Playing together

  • Chat, friends, parties with Party Sync and shared kill credit.
  • Guilds with levels, perks, weekly challenges and a guild bank (J).
  • Ranked duels with placement and tiers (H).
  • The Shard Exchange, trading between players and a mailbox.

Collecting

  • Professions and crafting, bags and materials (K, B).
  • Reputation, achievements and titles (U, Y).
  • Cosmetics, mounts with their own gear, riding training, and companion pets (R, Z, N).
  • Your own house, the Binder's Den, with 118 pieces of furniture (F).
  • The Shard Pass with daily and weekly challenges (V), and four yearly holidays (Q).

For the playtest

  • Feedback and bug reports from inside the game: F8, Menu > Feedback, or the button after a duel.
  • Invite codes for the closed playtest.
  • This page, with the known issues.
  • Simple, private counters on our own server (no trackers, no third parties).

Tell us what you think

Every report is read. Bugs, ideas, balance, or simply what you enjoyed: press F8 in the game.

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