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Update History
August 6, 2026 at 10:42 PM
Initial version: post-launch update summary covering the launch-week hotfixes, Hotfix 4, Patch 1 and Hotfix 5, plus the patch and hotfix naming split
Soulbound: Online has updated constantly since it launched into Steam Early Access on July 21, 2026. This page summarises what each published update changed. It is a digest rather than a full changelog, and it covers the updates the studio published publicly; a stream of smaller server-side hotfixes went out through the studio's community channels in the same period.
From the end of July the studio split its release naming. A patch is part of a scheduled update and bundles balance work and improvements together. A hotfix is an out-of-band release that goes out as soon as a problem is fixed, often the same day it is reported. Earlier releases used the hotfix label for both, which is why the numbering jumps around.
A short pre-weekend release. Creating a new character shortly after a deployment no longer risks crashing the game, and a separate crash on login was fixed. Getting caught on the large hemlock near Virelda no longer leaves the character or nearby interactions broken, and reloading after that happens no longer breaks later interactions with plants, rocks or lockboxes. Fishing at the Abyssal spot no longer makes the fishing window vanish the moment a fish is hooked, and high-tier crafting recipes can be completed again.
The first release under the new naming, and the one that made the top gear tiers workable in practice.
Area | Change |
|---|---|
Smelting | Upgrading the smelter from level 5 to level 6 now takes significantly less time |
Mining | Mining progression was rebalanced so it is less skippable, and dungeon chest ore rewards were adjusted so mining stays worthwhile for longer |
Crafting | Chronosteel crafting experience was rebalanced for its tier |
World map | Resource tooltips now show the correct drops for each zone |
Regions | Region selection now communicates whether character creation is available. Existing characters can still log in anywhere, and disabled creation is temporary |
Gear icons | Missing inventory and equipment icons for some Tier 6 weapons now appear |
Encounters | Lunar Plateau bosses no longer jump out of bounds and crash the run, and Farpoint Storm rooms no longer strand players without an exit portal |
Items | Several weapons and pieces of headgear that broke combat were fixed, including the Viridium Yoku Staff, both Dark Yoku heavy weapons, the Necrotic Warrior Crown and the Neotilus Trailseeker Visor |
The largest post-launch release so far, and the one that reworked combat balance across the whole ability roster. Solo runs were made slightly tougher and three-player runs slightly easier so difficulty scales more evenly with party size.
Area | Change |
|---|---|
Combat balance | Fortify, Bomb, Machine Gun, Drone, Blackhole, Greatsword, Gleam Twins, Staff, Chakram and Sword were all retuned. Fortify's base value and duration were cut sharply, bombs gained damage and shed their negative trade-off stats, and the greatsword and chakram had their cooldowns shortened |
Damage types | Phantom Resonance on the chakram now grants void damage instead of ethereal, and staff relics moved off ethereal onto explosive damage |
Relic display | Relic paths now stack as separate rows rather than drawing as one connected line, with standalone relics shown beneath them, and rare relics that had gone missing from selections were restored |
Legendary items | Several legendary effects that could reach a 100% trigger chance and run away with a fight had their trigger rates corrected |
Life skills | Yoku catfish are easier to farm, and guild fishing tasks need fewer catches so fishing progression is less stamina-heavy |
Gear tooltips | Ring secondary stats were returned to their intended values and necklace tooltips now show their stats and legendary effects correctly |
Quests | Fragment hunts, contract board unlocks and several quest reward and progression faults were fixed, and quest fragments became key items so they can no longer be lost when a bag is full |
Naming | Dungeon names and type labels were corrected, including several dungeons labelled Trail instead of Trial |
The opening days were dominated by server capacity. A set of bugs capped how far each server environment could scale, so far fewer players could get in than the studio had planned for. Six new player-facing environments were deployed and the capacity of each existing one was raised. Two of the most damaging early faults, players losing items and players getting stuck in place, were fixed within the first days, and the achievement system was temporarily switched off after being traced as the cause of a wider set of problems, then restored.
The same release rolled up the launch-week hotfixes: in-quest guidance for finding hemlock and copper ore, new portal icons for resource and drill event rooms, gear tooltip compare hints, adjusted respawn timing on Voltgrass patches and Neo-Tilus fishing spots, a fix for the crash after the Noxley Drill event, power cores added to more drop tables, cloak recipes added to the gearforge from level 2 upward, working leaderboards for every Dungeon Finder entry, and a fix that stopped players entering apartments before unlocking apartment access.
The studio also used the same announcement to confirm what was coming next: the first raid, language localisation, more NPC voiceover, and tests toward ten-player co-op dungeons.
Before the Steam launch the game ran as a browser and Discord title with its own long patch history. Those releases apply to the earlier build rather than the Early Access client and are not summarised here. Background on that period is on the SpiderWare page.
