Quests

A quest is an objective handed out by an NPC or by something you can interact with in the world. Quests carry the story, teach abilities, open cities, and gate the higher dungeon rungs, so the questline is not optional decoration. Several of the things a character needs most sit behind one.

Chapter 1 runs as a linear main storyline with optional side quests hanging off it. Quests are a separate system from the repeatable contracts handed out at the Pioneers Guild, which pay skill experience and gold rather than moving the story along.

Reading the Quest Markers

The world marks quests with two symbols in two colours, and the pairing tells you the whole state at a glance.

Quest tracking on the world map was made more visible in the 20 August 2026 patch, so the map is now a reasonable way to work out where a tracked objective actually sits. The same patch replaced the dialogue presentation with refreshed boxes, portraits and choice styling, which changed how quest conversations look rather than how they work.

What Quests Gate

This is the part worth reading before anything else, because a handful of quests are hard prerequisites for content elsewhere.

The two ability unlocks in that table are player-documented rather than named in a patch note, so treat them as a good pointer rather than a certainty. The rest are corroborated either by the studio's own notes or by the gating already described on our dungeon and raid pages.

Getting into Arcadia at all is its own gated sequence: clear the entry-tier Eastern Reach dungeon once, take the follow-up from the Virelda Chief, then present the Silver Chalice to the guard on the front gate. Back routes exist but only work in one direction, so the questline is the only durable way in.

Quests by City

The lists below are drawn from player-gathered documentation rather than from a patch note, and quest rosters shift during Early Access. Names are reliable pointers; whether a specific quest is currently handed out is not something a list can guarantee.

Virelda

• Welcome to Virelda

• Sow Much Trouble

• Thirsty Work

• Guns for Hire

• Cooking Up a Sandstorm

• Dune It Yourself

• Big Fish, Little Fish, Cardboard Box

• Maki-ng the Most of What You Have

• Mean, Green, Killing Machine

• Lock Out

• Package Deal

• Point Proven

• STR vs DEX

• The Blockade

• Vesper's Challenge

• Seek and Destroy

• Blackwake Barry's Vote

• When Good Pioneers Die

Arcadia City

• A Beacon Reborn

• A Little Bit of Recon

• A Suspicious Silence

• Blind Robbery

• Board Broken, Ego Bruised

• City of Light and Shadow

• Curiosity Killed Them

• Diplomatic Relations

• Don't Project Onto Me!

• Express-o Delivery

• Feeling Crafty

• Jesse, We Need to Cook

• Love at First Byte

• N-Everdune

• Onward and Upward

• Outskirt Outlaw

• Romeo, O Romeo

• Scratching the Glitch

• Signal on the Rails

• Smooth Operator

• The Customer is Always Right

• The Graffiti Train

• The Power Behind the Power

• Training Wheels

• You've Got Mail

Neo-Tilus

Everdune

• Blackwake Betty's Vote

• Excavation Investigation

• Mirelle's Lost Pages

• Monster Hunter

• Piece by Piece

• Research Duty

• The Levora Expedition

• The Nyxanthium

Other Regions

Player documentation also records quests in areas our other pages do not yet describe in detail.

Lunar is the best attested of these. Tremors appears in the 20 August 2026 patch as the seventeenth step of the main story, and a Lunar task board is named in an earlier patch, so quest content out there is definitely live even though the studio's plan lists a larger Lunar expansion for much later.

Quests Fixed or Changed Since Launch

Patch notes are the one place quest names are confirmed by the studio rather than by players, so this table doubles as the list of quests we know for certain exist in the current build.

One row there matters beyond a bug list. Foundational Error was disabled across every environment on 28 July 2026 and no later patch has brought it back, so any guide still treating it as a live prerequisite is describing a quest the build no longer hands out.

Patch 4 also closed a right-hand-wall route that let players bypass the Daito blockade. That note names an obstacle rather than a quest, so it is not in the table above.

Quests and Contracts

The two systems are easy to confuse because both put a marker over an NPC. The short version is that quests advance the story and are done once, while contracts are the repeatable skill work described on The Pioneers Guild. Contract series carry roman numerals, such as Blades of Trust II or Circuit Sleuth IV; quests do not. Live events are a third thing again, covered on Live Events and Commissions.

For the characters who hand these out, see NPCs. For what the story is actually about, see Lore and Setting, and for where to start, Getting Started.

Quest rosters, gating and rewards are all being tuned during Early Access, so treat the specifics here as current rather than permanent.